


Reverberate

by darkfinch



Series: Dawning [2]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e15 The Big Bang Job, Episode: s03e16 The San Lorenzo Job, Multi, Nightmares, Protective Eliot Spencer, spoilers for most of season 3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:14:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25640092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkfinch/pseuds/darkfinch
Summary: Eliot’s past is a living, breathing thing, and it will follow him wherever he runs until it kills him.Or,The team goes after Damien Moreau. It hurts, but it helps. It’s like re-breaking bones to let them heal right.
Relationships: Alec Hardison & Parker & Eliot Spencer, Developing Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer, Eliot Spencer & Team Leverage, past Damien Moreau/Eliot Spencer - Relationship
Series: Dawning [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915399
Comments: 91
Kudos: 173





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! 
> 
> This story is a sequel to ["Dawning"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25152973), and it'll probably make more sense if you've read that one first, so I'd recommend starting over there! 
> 
> Thank you for reading!

Eliot’s past is a living, breathing thing, and it will follow him wherever he runs until it kills him. He’s learned to be able to live with this, after the cycle of _run-hide-run-hide-run_ collapsed in on itself and led him here. 

Here’s the truth of it: Eliot doesn’t have a dark past so much as he has a strangely bearable present. The things he’s done aren’t made any more distant by the things he’s currently doing; Eliot’s past is soaked in blinding red and it is _right fucking behind him_ , always, bleeding into the here and now every time he shuts his eyes, staining his hands in a way he will never, ever get out, no matter how much good he does, no matter how many people they help, no matter no matter no matter. 

Eliot _was_ a murderer just like he _was_ a soldier, just like he _was_ an angry kid trying to make his life mean _something_ , even if it got him and a lot of other people killed and broke his daddy’s heart. 

It only makes sense that it would catch up to him eventually.

This is what he’s thinking, under the faint ringing in his ears, when Nate gathers them around the table and says the world is ending.

“She wants us to take down Damien Moreau.” 

And Eliot thinks, _of course_. Because it’s been a good few years, and it’s been better than he could ever deserve, and someone telling him to reckon with his demons with a gun to the heads of the people he loves is _exactly_ how this was always going to end.

**

The good news is, Eliot makes it a priority to know where Moreau is at all times, so they can avoid him.

The bad news is, Eliot makes it a priority to know where Moreau is at all times, so they can avoid him, and they’re circling closer and closer to the man with every passing day, and he feels like he’s being dragged towards a woodchipper by his fucking ankles. 

They steal a high school reunion and the word on the street in Africa. They steal a train, and Eliot plays guitar, and Nate’s _dad_ comes out of the woodwork. They take out bad guys like they always take out bad guys, and it’s fine, it’s almost normal, except for the part where Eliot paces and sleeps in ten-minute increments and wakes up with a scream rattling behind his teeth every night.

**

“Nobody touches Moreau,” Sophie says. A well-known fact. The sky is blue, and the earth is round, and no one lays a finger on Damien Moreau, no matter who they are or what he’s done or where they think it’ll get them. 

There’s a flicker of either nausea or pride in Eliot’s stomach. _No_ , he thinks, _they don’t, and in another lifetime you’d have to go through me to get to him._ He hastily wraps that thought up in barbed wire and shoves it into the box at the back of his head where he keeps...pretty much everything of his life from more than three years ago that’s not directly useful for a con. It’s a good system, really. It’s fine.

**

It’s Wednesday and it’s raining, and they’re at one of Hardison’s apartments, and the light’s filtering soft and thin through the windows. They’re between jobs. Eliot’s cooking, because that’s what Eliot does; Nate’s sipping coffee with too much whiskey in it, because that’s what Nate does. Mostly, though, they’re watching the chaos unfolding on the couch. 

Hardison’s trying to teach Parker and Sophie how to play some cartoon racing game on the TV. It’s slow going, since Parker just wants to go fast and doesn’t really care where the racetrack is; also, since Sophie’s one of the most secretly competitive human beings he’s ever met, and her hand-eye-coordination is _awful_. They’re leaning too far into each other’s personal space and smacking each other, and they’re all together, and it’s cold outside, but the room is warm.

“Did you just _blue shell me?”_ Hardison yells. Parker’s triumphant laugh is perfect, makes something swell up in Eliot’s chest he can’t name, and he has to stop chopping vegetables for a second and wait for his hands to steady. It still catches him by surprise, sometimes, the comfort of this; going from isolation and _one more job_ to wanting nothing more than to sprawl out on the couch and listen to Hardison explain some Dungeons and Dragons thing to him and Parker for half an hour and pretend to be pissed off about it. To keep them fed and safe and happy. It knocks him off-balance like nothing else.

“What’re you making, anyway?” Nate asks. He’s really asking something else, if the look in his eye is anything to go by, but Eliot’s slicing garlic now and he doesn’t have time for grifter shit off the clock.

“Tagliolini nero con gamberi.” 

“Oh, of course. Tag—”

“Pasta. I’m makin’ pasta, the kind Parker likes.” Nate smiles. “What?”

“Nothing.” 

Eliot squints. He’s smiling like it’s something. “Quit hoverin’. No hoverin’ in my kitchen.” 

Nate leaves, hands up in mock-surrender, to sit in the armchair closest to Sophie and watch her with something open and warm in his eyes; and Eliot smiles, too, because they’re very stupid, and it’s a good day, and Eliot loves them.

Fifteen seconds later, his phone buzzes in his pocket. He’s close enough to the boiling pot of water that he has to squint at the message through the steam.

_[16:32] DM @ RR Htl, Brln_

The room tilts a little. The gears start turning.

Right now, as he’s getting ready to cook homemade pasta for his people, Damien Moreau is checking into a hotel in Germany. It’s ten or so hours to Berlin. More, if he makes a couple pit stops and works his way through a few aliases, like he should, but he could be in the city by tomorrow morning. 

He imagines watching Moreau get out of bed, eat breakfast, sip tea by the window; imagines watching him through the scope of a sniper rifle as the sun crawls its way into the sky, the shadows stretching out, the world waking up. Pulling the trigger and painting the hotel room floor in watery red. 

Saving his team the trouble.

 _Thanks_ , he texts back, and suddenly he isn’t hungry. 

**

Killing Moreau should be easy. He knows, objectively, that Damien’s a Bad Guy, now—was when Eliot’d known him, too, only Eliot’d been just as bad, so maybe he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he just hadn’t cared. 

The math works out like this: Eliot was a bad person. Eliot did bad things. Eliot _is_ a bad person, who did bad things, and just because he’s tried to be better—ripped himself open at the seams and done his level best to scrape out all the evil, there, make what’s left of him good for something—doesn’t make it so he did them any less. As far as he knows, Moreau’s never wasted ten minutes on trying to redeem himself, and Eliot’s had worse reasons to kill someone, and it should be easy.

And yet. He doesn’t do it.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to kill Moreau (or, well, he doesn’t, but not too much more than he doesn’t want to kill _anyone_ , these days). He _needs_ Moreau to be gone, needs the threat of him eliminated and six feet underground where his team can’t fling themselves in his direction like they think there’s a chance in hell they’ll win. Like they think there’s any way this’ll end well for any of them. He needs, with a desperation that hums in the back of his skull and winds him tighter and tighter with every day they stay on this path, to make a world for them where Damien Moreau doesn’t exist.

He knows they’d be disappointed. Alarmed, maybe, that someone’d gotten to the man first. He knows this isn’t how they’d like their problems to be solved; they want to be good, do good, leave things better than how they’d found them. It doesn’t matter. Protecting them is Eliot’s job. His hands are already dirty, are already stained red with so very much blood, and he’ll never be clean of it anyway, and it’d be a small sacrifice to make to keep them safe.

But Eliot doesn’t do it. He thinks, and he thinks, and he doesn’t act. They run cons and help people and Eliot’s brain plays hypothetical snuff films over every second he’s not moving, and Moreau keeps breathing, and Eliot doesn’t kill him.

He pauses the TV to go fold some laundry and his brain says _could just wrap my hands ‘round his throat and—_

Sophie laughs in his ear over the comms, and _through the back door, hand over his mouth, snap his neck before anyone even knows I’m—_

“It's a little mom-and-pop shop down the road from Penzer's,” Hardison tells them. “It's run by Art and Joy Bauer. They've been—” _Still have that fake passport from that thing in Munich I could burn, catch up to him between the car and the entrance, double-tap to the face and—_

He thinks, and he thinks, and he doesn’t act, and Nate brings them circling closer to danger with every job they take, and killing Moreau should be easy, but it’s not.

**

“Say my name again,” Damien asks him. It’s winter in Lucerne, and his nose and cheeks are pink with cold. Eliot does, just to hear him laugh.

“ _Murrow._ Do you know that’s how you sound? Like _burrow_. It’s French, Eliot, you shouldn’t butcher it like this.”

“You’re not French.”

“No. Still, though.”

They’re lying low. Damien has a bandage on his collarbone from someone getting far too close, closer than they’ve ever gotten while Eliot’s been in charge. Eliot brushes it with his fingertips—barely touching, like maybe he's just fixing his collar—and thinks, viciously, sharp like a promise: _anyone who ever wants to hurt you is gonna have to kill me first._

**

Running at John Douglas Keller isn’t Eliot’s idea of a great time, but it’s nice to be able to fuck with someone this close to Moreau and know he won’t be recognized; Keller’s new, ‘cause Moreau’s old transport manager is buried in a shallow grave outside São Paulo. Using kids is new, too. It makes him wonder how much worse Moreau’s operation has gotten since he left. 

Eliot asks, because he’d love to make this easy, “If I just take Keller out, ‘s there another way to Moreau?” 

“Not a fast one,” Hardison tells him. “Moreau got his start smuggling antiquities from war zones—”

 _Yeah,_ Eliot thinks, _I fuckin' know that_ , only that’s not really fair, ‘cause he’s spent four months pretending he _doesn’t_ know that. They do some Crime Archeology. They dig through the foundations of Moreau’s empire—the one Eliot helped build, brick by brick, back when he thought if he didn’t look at the evil it wasn’t really happening—and he wishes it felt like atonement, but it just makes his skin crawl. 

Sophie feels guilty, about the things that happen when you tug on one string in a web of thousands, and Eliot doesn’t know how to say _you’re not the one who’s done wrong here_ without cracking his chest open and implicating himself, so he keeps his mouth shut and beats up some security guards and listens to the doomsday clock go _tick, tick, tick_ in the back of his head.

Four months. They’re getting close. He doesn’t know how to both help them and stop them from getting closer. 

**

Eliot is in his bed, only it isn’t his bed. He can feel the weight of a body lying next to him. The telltale dip in the mattress. The light is coming through the window at the wrong angle and the sheets are too soft and there’s a hand around his throat. 

“Why did you leave me?” Damien is asking. His voice is soft in Eliot’s ear, sleep-hoarse and gentle. Eliot can’t breathe. His fingers are pressing bruises just under Eliot’s jaw, and his eyes are dark, and his face is hazy, somewhere above him. Everything is just out of focus. 

The room keeps swimming, changing, shifting between hotel rooms and old apartments and Damien’s endless line of mansions. The only constants are the demanding weight at his trachea, Damien’s eyes, Damien’s voice. Eliot can’t breathe. Eliot can’t _breathe_. He wants to grab the man’s wrist, loosen his hold, do _something_ , but he can’t move; his body won’t listen to him, feels useless and heavy like he’s full of sand.

“Why did you leave me?” And Eliot can’t remember. Eliot can’t breathe. He knows he’s done something very, very wrong, but he can’t remember what it is. Damien’s hand is warm where it chokes him, firm, and his head is spinning from the lack of oxygen, and his lungs are aching, and Damien’s hand is so hot it’s burning him, now, a brand on his skin—

“Why did you leave me?” And Eliot doesn’t know, and Damien’s hand is—

He wakes up all at once, like his body knows it’s in danger but doesn’t know why, shivering and soaked in sweat and desperately gasping for air. His pulse is thundering in his ears. He’s gripping his sheets hard enough to hurt his knuckles. 

_Not real,_ he thinks, like a mantra, like it’ll do anything. _Not real, not real._ He runs a hand through his wet hair, over his eyes, over his throat—gingerly, half-expecting a mark, a sign, some damage left behind by the fingers he can still half-feel on his skin. _Not real._ His breath stutters like he wants to hyperventilate. Like he wants to cry, maybe; he clenches his jaw, stares at a fixed point on the wall and forces it steady. _In, out. In, out._

The clock on the bedside table says 03:42 in thin green letters. He drags himself out of bed to go break his hands on the heavy bag. 

**

They get him a sword for Christmas?

He’s not expecting them to get him anything. He doesn’t know how they could’ve possibly known he’d wanted this—wanted it absently, quietly, in the back of his mind, because it’s not the kind of thing he’d buy for himself and feel like he deserved it. 

It’s perfect. It makes his chest ache, that they’d thought of him. That they’d gone through the trouble, like he’s family. Maybe he is. The joy of it washes away all the guilt that’s been festering in him for months, even if it’s just for a little while. Hardison’s happy. Parker gets her snow. It’s a good day.

He slices a couple chairs in half and feels giddy, and light, and younger than he has in a decade.

**

“You okay, man?” Hardison asks, because Eliot’s just dropped a plate. 

Eliot doesn’t drop things, and Hardison knows that, and Eliot knows that, but Eliot’s phone’s just buzzed and Moreau’s at the Manhattan penthouse and he could be over there in three hours, give or take, if he left right now. Less, if he flies. He can still remember the layout of that one; they’d stayed there for a few weeks in July, once, and he knows he can make it from the back entrance to the top floor in under four minutes. From the elevator to the bedroom in a minute and ten seconds, counting the time to deal with security, if he surprises them.

Three guards by the elevator.

One by the exit to the stairs. 

Two outside the office. 

Head of security’d be stationed in front of the bedroom door—or inside, if Moreau keeps him as close as he’d kept Eliot.

Ten minutes, tops. Easy. All their problems solved. 

“Fine,” says Eliot, and goes to fetch a broom, and does not drive to Manhattan.

**

It keeps taking him by surprise, the fear.

Parker’s hair smells like jasmine, and she’s got her toes tucked under his thigh ‘cause they’re always cold, no matter how many fuzzy socks he buys—ostensibly for himself, despite being too small and too colourful—and then leaves where she can find them. Hardison’s fallen asleep with his mouth open, laptop on and whirring softly in his lap. He’s still got his arm draped over the back of the couch, and Eliot’s caught between them, bracketed by solid warmth on either side. The TV’s playing credits. He can’t remember what they’d been watching; some old sci-fi thing Hardison’d been going on about and then was too tired to finish.

It’s easy, like this, to feel some approximation of safety. He’s still hardwired the way he is, to be aware; glances around the room and checks exits every couple minutes; goes still and thinks _weight stance build are they armed_ anytime he hears footsteps in the hall outside; but he’s not _expecting_ anything. Hardison’s breathing deep and steady next to him. 

And then he remembers, and it’s like the bottom’s fallen right out of his stomach, for a second. Like he’s in one of Parker’s harnesses and the line’s just been cut. _They’re going after—_

**

“We need more time,” Eliot tells them, and he knows already he’s run out; they’re here, and Moreau’s close enough to reach out and touch, and he’s failed at keeping them safe. He’s failed at keeping them away from this. They’re determined, and kind, and shuffling their way straight into the abattoir.

And Eliot thinks, _I love you._

And Eliot thinks, _I can’t watch you die._

And Eliot thinks, _I would do anything you asked me to, but please, God, don’t ask me for this—_

Nate asks. And Eliot nods, and feels very far away from his body, and says, “Nate, me and Hardison’ll hit Moreau. We'll get an invite to the auction.”

It’s an easy choice in the sense that it’s his only choice; he can’t go alone. He doesn’t trust himself to. And he knows what Hardison’ll do, when Eliot pulls the rug out from under him: Sophie’d try to change the grift, and Moreau’d see right through it; Nate’d try to change the grift, and Moreau’d see right through it; Parker…Parker is never going to be that close to Damien Moreau, not for any reason, and he’d be happy to die to make sure of that.

Hardison, though. Hardison’ll trust him. Hardison’ll look over at him, terrified, from the corner of his eye, and stick to the plan, and _trust_ him; and Eliot is going to walk him to the killing floor for it. 

**

“Nah, I don’t really go in for all the...you know, the _God_ thing, anymore.”

“Really?” Like it’s the most interesting thing Eliot could’ve told him. They’re on the floor of a balcony somewhere in Malta, and it’s a warm night, and they’re out looking at the wide, dark sky. They’ve been drinking since the sun started to go down. “I would’ve thought, what with the whole—”

“Country, backwoods, cowboy—” Damien laughs, which is what he’d been aiming for.

“Yes, that. Oklahoma, _et cetera,_ forgive me. And, you know, you’re very...” He gestures with his glass. “Loyal? Is that what I’m—no, don’t listen to me. Tell me why.”

He shrugs. “It’s like...it’s like...how’m I supposed to be...devoted to something, love it, and then be scared of it, too?” He’s doing a shit job at explaining it, all that old shame and rejection and whatever else tangled up tight behind his ribs. “I dunno. God’s never done me any favours. Not enough for me to talk and expect for him to listen, anyway.”

“Mm, but what is devotion,” Damien asks him, drunk on wine and leaning too hard into Eliot’s shoulder, “but love and fear, in equal measure?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is purely self-indulgent; I thought I'd worked through all of my thoughts re: The Big Bang Job and Damien Moreau with Dawning, but as it turns out, there's more! Thank you so much for reading! I treasure all comments and kudos, and hope you have a really lovely day.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this is an entire chapter devoted to the pool scene. No, I am not sorry.

The heat’ll kill him, if the blood loss doesn’t get him first.

He’s somewhere in Honduras. The world is bathed in yellow and orange and he doesn’t know what city he’s in anymore, doesn’t know if his ribs are broken or just cracked, doesn’t know if the DIY first aid he’s done on his leg is going to be enough to keep him alive or just enough to draw the suffering out. 

He has a cell phone, and it still has a charge, and it’s going to stay in his pocket because he knows exactly who he’ll call if it doesn’t. 

He’d pick up on the first ring, Eliot knows. He’d say his name. 

_It’s dangerous business,_ Damien’d tell him, voice like cool water, _helping little old ladies cross the street._ He’d be angry. He’d be smug. _Good thing you’re still valuable, more or less. I’ll send someone._

And Eliot’d be safe, and he might have to spend some time bruising his knees on the hardwood in Damien’s office to earn his place back at his side; might have to hurt a little, degrade himself, but that’s no hardship. That’s no hardship. 

He doesn’t call, ‘cause he’s trying to be good, and you don’t get two shots at leaving the devil. 

**

His name still opens doors with Moreau’s men, all these years later, and he doesn’t know how to feel about that. The trust woven into it. The assumption that if Eliot ever did show up again—unannounced, prodigal son—it wouldn’t be to hurt him.

“I’m Eliot Spencer,” he says, and it doesn’t sound like _I’m Nate’s, and Sophie’s, and Parker’s, and Hardison’s, and I take care of them. I keep them safe_. Not here. Not for this.

 _I’m the devil’s lapdog,_ he’s saying, _let me in. I belonged to him, once. Let me in. Let me in._

“Why’d you tell him your real name, Eliot?” Hardison asks, over and over again, and Eliot doesn’t say that it’s the only bargaining chip he’s got left, doesn’t say he’s walking them both into something they never could’ve been ready for and he is _so fucking sorry for what’s about to happen_ , doesn’t lie and say he doesn’t know.

“Just stick close to me, okay?” he says instead, like Hardison’s proximity to him is going to do anything but get him killed. 

**

The thing about Eliot is this: he likes to have a plan like he likes to breathe. 

He doesn’t have to actually _follow_ it; it’s more something he does in the back of his head, just in case, to smother the sparks of panic always threatening to become a fire. 

_Someone’s gonna break in and kill me_ , his brain tells him; and Eliot gets out of bed and spends four hours planting weapons around his apartment and setting up mirrors so he can check all the exits at a glance, and the fear dies down a little. 

_We’re gonna be on a job, and Damien Moreau will be there, out of nowhere, and he’ll look at me and see me and know me and I’ll fucking collapse in on myself_ , he thinks at three in the morning; so Eliot calls up some old contacts and sets up a web of folks who’ll text him if they catch wind of his old boss’ location. He maps the man’s movements, and tries to make sense of the pattern, and the fear dies down a little.

 _The doors are gonna open and they’re gonna walk us over to where Moreau is waiting and he’s gonna kill us both_. They’re in the elevator, and the fear is a crackling bonfire at the base of his skull, and Eliot nods to himself, because it certainly does seem that way.

The Plan is: he’s escorting the middleman— _he’ll put me on my knees and kill me right there, and then Hardison’ll—_

The Plan is: he’s escorting the middleman, here strictly on business, here to vouch for— _Hardison is here and Moreau is here and I’m gonna get him killed, and they'll make it slow, ‘cause I left and no one gets to do that, and I’ve failed at this, I’ve—_

The elevator doors open, and it’s second nature to plan, but Eliot is blank. 

_Map the exits_ , he thinks, walking along the pool’s edge, and there are none. _Count the guns_ , he thinks, and he can’t, he can’t, he’s walking towards Damien Moreau, unarmed, with Hardison in tow—Hardison, who is a kid, who is trusting him, who is the lamb being led to slaughter—and he can hardly think over the ringing in his ears and his body is full of static and—

_Hardison is here._

He narrows his focus down to just that.

The Plan is: Eliot is going to get Hardison out of this alive, no matter what it costs him.

Eliot takes a steadying breath. He can taste the chlorine on the back of his tongue. Bitter. Bitter. _Count_ , he thinks again. The air is wet and his heartbeat is frayed and unravelling. _Count_. Four exits—no, three. Three. Door four is a sauna. Five guns along the length of the pool, one by the back exit, two more by the sauna door—eight guns to his zero. One Chapman.

Chapman’s eyes are flat and dead like Eliot remembers, and it's good, it's a relief, because Eliot knows how to handle Chapman; he wears his insecurity half an inch under his skin. It’s easy enough to get to, if you know where to cut.

Eliot pulls _Moreau's Favourite_ out of the back of his mind like an old costume and dusts it off. Steps into it. Lets himself be that again, all glaring condescension and anger and easy dismissal, just for a moment; and he can tell it works from the little crack in the surface of Chapman’s reptile calm. The tightness around his eyes. It must sting a little; always second best, even after Eliot’s been gone for longer than he was with them. 

The sauna door opens. 

**

Damien hands him the gun, and there’s a man on the floor, shaking. On his knees. Not a threat. Eliot’s just gotten off a flight from Taiwan and he hasn’t slept in three days.

“I’d like you to handle him,” Damien says. “I don’t have the patience.” 

“Alright.”

He cocks his head to the side, searching, dark eyes rifling carefully through what he can see of Eliot. He’s hunting for something specific. Something important. Whatever it is, he comes up empty. “You don’t want to know why?”

“Does it matter?”

Damien smiles, pleasantly surprised, like he’s a well-trained dog and he’s done a new trick for the very first time. Master and a hound. He runs his thumb over Eliot’s knuckles. Over where the cool metal is pressed into his palm.

“No. No, I suppose it doesn’t.” 

**

He’s had Eliot kill three of his men since Thursday, blade to throat, dark blood on kitchen tile. It hasn’t helped. Damien’s been angry for days, and it fills the room like a smothering cloud. He’s pacing and he’s pacing and he’s holding a gun. 

Eliot doesn’t think Damien would shoot him, but he knows the man thinks in black and white; you’re an asset, or you’re not. You’re worth his time, or you’re not. Eliot’s not sure what he’s worth, right now; he keeps his breathing shallow, and tries not to take up space, and waits for the storm to break.

Damien’s voice cuts through the air, sharp and electric. “You’re going to do something for me.” 

_Anything_ , he’s already thinking, any fear in him drowned out by the answering rumble of anticipation in his chest. _Anything. Anything._

**

“Spencer,” Damien is saying. Has been saying. His hand is tangled into Eliot’s hair, angling Eliot’s head upwards, forcing him to look him in the eye. He thinks it should hurt, the hand pulling at his hair. The twist of his neck. It should sting. He doesn’t feel it. Damien’s eyes are wild and dark. “Would you look at me? I’m speaking to you. Hanna says you haven’t eaten since I left.”

“’M not hungry.” His stomach is churning. His mouth tastes like metal. The worst thing he’s ever done, he’s done for Damien, and it’s going to fucking dissolve him until there’s nothing left, just blood and foam and the horror of it.

“You’re not—?” Damien’s laugh is brittle. Thin ice. “I don’t care. I don’t—you think I’ll let you just—” He takes a shaky breath. “Listen to me. This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to eat something, and you’re going to _stop_ _being ridiculous_ , and you’re going to...Eliot, I don’t understand what the problem is. Tell me what the problem is.”

Eliot doesn’t answer.

“Eliot.”

Eliot doesn’t answer.

“So what, so—what, so I’ve broken you? Is that it? Hm? You expect me to believe you’re that fragile?" He gives Eliot’s head a little shake. "Eliot Spencer, china doll?”

Eliot doesn’t answer, and Damien’s hand loosens in his hair, drops limply back to his side, curls into a fist and uncurls like he doesn’t know what to do with it. Eliot thinks of bile and the break of bone and the smell of burning flesh.

His voice is weaker, this time. Uncertain. He sounds like a stranger. “You could have said no, Eliot. It’s not like I _forced_ —if it was too much, why didn’t you just—” It's Eliot's fault, he's saying. It's always Eliot's fault.

And Eliot thinks, _but why did you ask me?_

**

The sauna door opens.

Damien Moreau is maybe three feet away, wreathed in steam, and Eliot knows this was a mistake, because this man _knows_ him. No amount of time or preparation was ever going to save them. He’ll look at Eliot like he always did, look right through him—picking him apart, seeing what he wants, seeing what he can use—and spot the deception from a mile away, and Hardison’ll die. They'll both die. 

His hair is wet. He’s staring at Eliot, and he knows him, and Eliot waits to collapse in on himself. 

And waits.

It doesn’t happen. He doesn’t know why it isn’t happening.

If there’s any surprise in Moreau, seeing Eliot there, it smooths itself into something neutral and pleased before it shows on his face. He smiles. Eliot almost can’t bear to look at him directly, keeps averting his eyes like he’s the fucking sun, like he’s not just a man in a bathrobe with no morals and more money than God. _The things I did for you,_ he thinks. _The things I would’ve done._

His eyes are lighter than Eliot remembers. 

“That's no way to treat an old friend,” he says. Hardison shifts next to him. Eliot feels like he’s being turned inside out. _Now you know._ But Hardison trusts him; glances over at him, terrified, from the corner of his eye, and sticks to the plan, just like Eliot knew he would. Just like Eliot’s been counting on. Time's gone tight like a rubber band, stretching, stretching, ready to snap.

“Damien,” he says, and the name tastes like gunmetal.

“Let’s catch up.”

Eliot once spent a year and a half fleeing various countries and sleeping with a knife under his pillow to avoid catching up with Moreau. 

He nods and follows him easily.

**

They’ve handcuffed Hardison to a chair. They’re in front of the pool. They’ve left Eliot free. He knows what handcuffs and a chair and a pool lead to, because he’s been the one doing the handcuffing and the drowning and the whole of it; he wonders how long they have until the man gets impatient and Hardison's suit gets wet.

Eliot, for his part, holds himself very, very still. He crosses his arms so his hands don’t shake. He wishes, for the first time in years, to be smaller than he is; to fold up in on himself like a paper crane, over and over again until he doesn’t exist anymore, until there’s nowhere left for the fear to be. 

“You work alone.”

“Things change.” 

Every second is a test. _He prefers beer. Is this one of your retrieval jobs? That quaint little hobby you’ve picked up since you left me? I know you, I know you, I know you, so what is this, exactly?_

Over the past five years, Moreau’s gone from wanting him dead (a sniper missing Eliot by half an inch as he fled Damien’s country) to wanting to drag him back to him (a tranquilizer dart and hands on his body and a bag over his head in Zurich) to suddenly leaving him be. Eliot’s been working under the assumption that Moreau’d stopped chasing because Eliot was no longer worth the effort. No longer valuable enough to send men after. That the distance and the time and the keeping his mouth shut have been his only saving grace, and if he ever crossed paths with the man again, he’d be made to suffer one way or another. 

He’s not so sure of that anymore.

For all that Moreau knows him, Eliot knows Moreau right back; he can see the undercurrent of something darker under the casual line of his shoulders, the fond smile, and there always is with him—betrayal, this time, probably, a gaping hole where his trust in Eliot used to be—and yet. It’s still casual. Still fond. Humouring the both of them. 

Moreau talks to him like they’re still on decent terms, sitting and smiling and sipping his scotch, and it occurs to Eliot, standing by the pool and lying through his teeth, that Moreau has thought of the last few years as _letting him have a hiatus_. A gap year, or five. Has assumed Eliot would show up again, under his own steam—unannounced, prodigal son—to pick up where they’d left off.

Eliot thinks, arms crossed, heart beating sick and uneven behind his ribs, that this might be worse.

“I don’t know you,” Moreau tells Hardison.

“I _do_ know _you_ ,” he tells Eliot, and his voice feels like honey, feels like the slow pull of a string anchored somewhere behind his ribs, and Eliot is in fucking _danger_. “We could talk.”

Only, they can’t. They can’t. There are some things you can’t say yes to if you want to say no later, and he won’t reopen this door. 

“Okay,” Moreau says, disappointed, unsurprised, “let’s keep it short.” 

Eliot does not move, because he knew this was coming. He does not move, because Moreau is watching him, knows him, knows what to look for in every tiny movement his body makes. 

Hardison hits the water. 

And Eliot counts. And Eliot prays to a God he hasn’t believed in since he was twenty-six.

“I never told anybody about you.” He tries to make it sound like _client confidentiality_ and not like _you have shrapnel scars along your spine and you only sleep well when the sun’s out and you’ve never met a rule you didn’t want to bend in your favour and I’ve never told a fucking soul, not about you, not about any of it, not even the people I love now._ He’s not sure he succeeds.

Hardison is drowning. 

Something raw and wet like dread twists in his gut.

“What else you got?” Moreau asks, and Eliot remembers watching the sun sink hot and red through the window of his office; how it made him look like something Other, something bigger than them both; remembers being pushed gently, Damien’s hand firm and warm on the back of his neck, over every line he’d ever drawn in the sand; and he knows how this goes, same as it always did. Damien pushing, and him saying no, and Damien pushing again; Eliot offering up everything he has; and Damien taking it, but still angling, always, for what he really wants. Slowly, deliberately, with that fond little smile on his face, until yes is the only answer left to give.

“Me,” he says, and Damien’s smile finally reaches his eyes.

**

It reminds him of Belgrade, too, even though he doesn’t want to admit it. 

“I still don’t see why we’re doing this,” Eliot tells him, weighing his life against the value of a baseball card. He's lost an argument. They’re in a hotel room in Serbia that costs per night more than he’d want to spend on a month of rent, and the sheets are black, and the bedroom smells like Damien’s shampoo. Eliot is strapping knives to his body. Damien is taking a bath. The steam makes the air hot and sweet and the violence seems very far away, even though Eliot’ll likely be covered in blood—his and other people’s—in a few hours. He knows the card isn't the real target, knows he's being sent in to retrieve it just to cover the hit, but that doesn't really make him feel any better. There are simpler ways to get this done.

“I know,” Damien says. He’s sipping wine, and Eliot can hear the smile and the warmth in his voice. Damien could give Eliot backup, but he won’t. He could’ve let Eliot sleep on the floor last night—to watch the door, like Eliot’d wanted to—but he hadn’t. None of this is about what Damien could do, or what Eliot is capable of, or the _why_ of any of it; it’s about what Damien wants, and whether or not Eliot’ll give it to him.

Eliot always gives it to him, if he asks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I pinky promise that actual plot happens next chapter, I just had a lot of feelings about this...like... two-minute scene that prompted this entire fic and the one that came before it. 
> 
> Thank you for reading (and, as always, I treasure all comments and kudos, and hope the world is being kind to you) <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Warning for this chapter: there is a scene near the end involving the use of drowning as torture. Please proceed with caution if that freaks you out, etc etc. Take care <3]

Every time he’s thought about this, how this would go, it’s with the sky turning red-yellow-pink through the window. Somewhere quiet. On the couch, maybe, tucked away safely in one of Hardison’s apartments, TV on low in the background to muffle the silence a little. Some things aren’t meant to be said without a wall at your back and a place to hide.

Eliot doesn’t get that, in the end, because Eliot doesn’t deserve that much. 

“We've been chasing Moreau for six months, and you didn't tell us.”

“Because I was tryin'—”

“Because what?”

“—to figure out a way around this, all right, maybe take my shot before—”

“'Cause you're protecting him? Is that what you're—”

They’re outside. 

The sun is blinding, and they’re in a park, in public, and the sound of car engines and footsteps buzz around his ears like horse-flies. A bus drives past. There are at least three buildings nearby with half-decent vantage points, and Eliot feels raw and exposed, feels like the worst parts of him have been dragged out into the light to be inspected, and his brain is screaming at him that they should not be doing this; that Damien Moreau knows he’s in the city, now; that he needs to run and drag his team with him to a safe house and stop existing for a month or two. 

Hardison is alive. Eliot is alive. They’re going to get an invite to the auction, and the only minor downside is that Eliot’s sold something of himself he’d sworn would never be for sale again, not ever, not for any reason. _You risked my life. You risked my life. You risked my life._ He’s signed a contract in someone else’s blood, with a gun to Hardison’s head, for something they don’t know the value of yet.

It doesn't feel like a victory.

And Nate _still thinks_ they can handle Moreau. 

Eliot holds himself very still, and keeps his hands open and nonthreatening, and he’s never been more sure in his life that Nate is wrong. His heart is pounding. Hardison still smells like chlorine. They’re on the edge of a cliff and Nate wants them to keep marching forward and he doesn’t know how to make them understand.

“Every one of Moreau's men has innocent blood on their hands,” he tells them. “Every one of ‘em. Every one of ’em...are worse than me.” Because Eliot regrets it, at the very least. Carries the guilt with him. Lives it over again every night, the godawful shit he’s done for survival and money and misplaced loyalty. Every one of Moreau’s men would just keep tearing through people like the blood wasn't soaking through their boots until somebody put them down. 

“You think you know what I've done?” He’s spent three years as _their_ Eliot, who cooks and sings and makes fun of them, who uses his anger and his body and the violence in it only to keep them safe, and they deserve to know. They deserve to know about the still-wet blood trailing behind him. About the snarling thing in his chest. They deserve to know, and he can't bring himself to tell them. Not here. Not when he’s been scraped red and raw and it’s bright and he’s just offered what’s left of himself on a platter to the devil to keep them safe. Eliot is holding himself together by sheer force of will, and that’s not going to be enough to keep him standing, if Parker asks. If any of them ask. 

He can feel their eyes on him, and the guilt is a physical ache in his goddamn chest, hot and jagged, and he’d _known_ this would happen—has always known that this was going to happen—but somehow he’s still not prepared for how much it hurts. 

_You risked my life._

Nate has that look on his face like he’s trying to pull Eliot apart and see how he works. Trying to figure out how the hell he'd missed this for _six goddamn months_. 

“So,” he tries, voice cracking neatly through some of the tension, “ah, you said that Moreau is gonna give you details on the auction tomorrow. Why tomorrow?”

“Because he wants me to do somethin’ for him first,” Eliot says, quiet, throat tight, trying very hard not to do something stupid and humiliating like crying over how fucking trapped he feels. 

Nate’s gaze softens to a different kind of calculating. 

One thing Eliot likes about Nate is this: Nate has always nodded, unflinching, at the grisly reality of _why_ he knows all the little things he does. He gets it—even if it’s in an abstract kind of way that makes Eliot think he maybe doesn’t link _Eliot_ and _Eliot’s hands_ with the things Eliot’s done. Eliot’s mind is a catalogue of well-executed violence for a reason.

How does a killer hide injection sites? How would you take out a target on a plane? How do you ID someone off a million tiny details—posture, haircuts, the way they hold the knife they’re trying to drive between your ribs—so you know who’s coming to kill you? 

Ask Eliot. Ask Eliot. Ask Eliot. Nate’s looked it in the eye and called it _wetwork_ and worked with it, so long as Eliot’s useful. So long as Eliot doesn’t leave them flying blind, like he has now. 

So Nate says, “I'll bet he does,” unsurprised, because Nate knows how this game works, albeit from a distance. “What?”

And Eliot tells them, and Sophie says—easy, like it’s _fact_ —that he’s not that man anymore, and he wants to believe her like he wants to believe in redemption and God and a way out of this where nobody dies. 

If there ever were two Eliots, a before and an after with an uncrossable line in between, the past few hours have layered them over each other in a nauseating double exposure, overlapping again and again ‘til he can’t figure out how to tell them apart. Can hardly pick his own face out of the mess of it at all. They all know the thing he’s been hiding for half a year, and Moreau knows he’s in the city, and Hardison’s suit is still damp. 

“He might have to be,” Nate says, “to get us in. 

And Eliot thinks, _I love you._

And Eliot thinks, _I can’t watch you die._

And Eliot thinks, _I would do anything—_

“Only way to get the details of the auction is if I kill Atherton.” _Please, please, please,_ glittering in the light. _Please don’t ask me._

“Then that's what you're gonna do,” Nate says, and Eliot remembers a firm hand on the back of his neck, remembers giving away the last bleeding shred of himself and throwing up in Moreau's villa, and it sounds like an ending.

**

Eliot doesn’t have to kill Atherton. 

He wants to cry with relief; wants to cry because he never should’ve doubted Nate, never should’ve doubted his people, even if they don’t want to be his people after this. Even if he’s ruined this beyond any hope of saving. 

Nate holds his leash, now, but Nate isn’t Damien, and Parker curls up next to him on the couch at the hotel while they plan like he isn’t a weapon in a person-suit, and it all stays held together with duct tape and chewing gum, just for now. Just for a little while longer.

**

He sits in a car with Chapman. It feels like a lot of other times he’s sat in cars with Chapman, talking targets and disposal and snapping at each other’s throats. 

“You know how Moreau does things,” Chapman says, and Eliot is holding a gun, and he does, is the problem; he _does_ know how Moreau does things, and one of the things that Moreau does is give him leeway where no one else gets any. Because he likes Eliot. And that’s relevant to his life again, and Eliot has a gun in his hands, and it’s making his timelines melt together.

The metal is cool under his fingers. 

It's comforting, the weight of it, of this killing thing he's taught himself to hate. Familiar. It has been so many years since he held a firearm with any kind of _intent,_ and something fanged and hungry stirs beneath his ribs. It would be easy. It would be easy. He pulls the gun apart, and tosses it unceremoniously into the glove box, and throws on a layer of anger to hide the panic clawing its way up his throat.

“I wanted to extinguish the whole family,” Chapman is saying, and Chapman is _still fucking talking_ like he thinks Eliot cares about what _he wanted_ to do—like he thinks if he stops filling the silence, Eliot’ll remember who used to be in charge here. “Like we usually do.” 

The car feels too small.

There’s a little girl. 

The target is her father, and he tells her to listen to her mother, and Eliot thinks of shallow graves in Myanmar and smoke and dirt and blood and wants to be out of his body. Everything he has ever done is shoved right into that car with them, buzzing over his skin, and it is loud and thick and _smothering_ , and the only consolation he has is that there won’t be any new blood on his hands after today. 

Nate holds his leash, now, but Nate isn’t Damien; Nate’ll always try to find a way around breaking him, if he can.

So, he pretends to be Eliot Spencer, Cold-Blooded Killer. He goes back to the hotel and pretends to be Eliot Spencer, Half-Decent Person. He paces manically along the hallway in front of their rooms—back and forth, back and forth, tiger in a cage—and aches for something to hit.

Here’s what he knows, and what Nate knows, because Nate knows how to play this game: Atherton isn’t the price. 

The boundary is. 

_I don’t kill people anymore_ , Eliot’s said, firm and sure of himself; and Damien’s seen that glittering thread of self-control and run his finger along it, and handed Eliot a knife, and said, _you will for me_. 

That’s the price. That’s the cost. He’s lucky he doesn’t have to pay it today. 

Hardison still won’t look at him.

**

So, he expects to die, in the warehouse.

The Italian’s there. It’s not the kind of place where rich people hold auctions. The phone rings in his hand, loud, seven trumpets at the end of the world. 

It’s a familiar kind of fear. It’s the kind he knows what to do with. 

Moreau’s sent men after him, and it feels a lot like the last few times Moreau’s sent men after him, only better, because Eliot can count footsteps and guns and rapidly closing exits and _knows_ he’s not meant to come out of this alive. Moreau’s not dragging Eliot back to him, firm and knowing, to remind him why he’d stayed for three years; Moreau’s tying up loose ends. He knows Eliot’s too far gone to be useful to him, anymore. Asset or liability, asset or liability, and Eliot’s finally proved himself a liability.

It’d be the best news he’s gotten in months, if Nate weren’t here, too.

“I sent some friends to continue the conversation.” His voice is cool water, like it always was, and Eliot can see the surface of it stretched out before him. Dark and cold and final. _I caught you,_ he’s saying. _I know you, I know you, I know you. And I’ve won._

“Well, then,” Eliot says, like a promise, like chaining their wrists together, like tying a brand new thread between them, “I'll see you soon.” 

Because Eliot doesn’t believe in God, anymore, but he knows—with the unshakeable certainty that he’s about to die, that the sky is blue and the earth is round and he has things to pay for—where he’ll end up when his heart stops beating, and he knows Damien’ll be right there next to him soon enough. 

Side by side, burning like napalm ‘til the end of it all.

**

“I can do that myself,” Eliot grumbles to the ceiling. Damien is holding an ice pack to his skin. 

They’re in Odessa, keeping their heads down, and he’s messed up his shoulder for the third time this month. It’s not his fault, really; it’s just that his restraint is tied to Damien’s will, these days, to Damien’s safety and Damien’s wellbeing and Damien himself—double knotted right around the man’s pinky finger—and when the deal they’d been negotiating had gone so far sideways that someone’d held a gun to Damien’s head, and he’d _flinched_...well, Eliot had maybe lost his mind a little bit. 

It’s not too bad: a bruised rib; a split lip; a stiff, aching shoulder, painted blue and purple and blotchy red. He’ll have to stay where he is now, sprawled out on the trillion thread count sheets in the master bedroom, and take it easy for a day or two while the swelling goes down. No harm done.

Damien doesn’t seem to agree.

“If I wanted to hear you speak, Spencer,” he says mildly, pressing down until the bones grind together and Eliot’s face twists up in pain, “I would have asked you to.” 

Eliot nods, and Damien shifts his weight where he’s kneeling over him. Eases up on the pressure. Eliot melts back into the mattress. 

“You’re no good to me, hurt,” Damien tells him. Eliot nods again. They’ve had this talk before. “Useless. You understand that, yes?”

“Yessir.”

“What would happen, if someone were to try to kill me, now, hm? And my head of security is lying around with one arm?”

“I’d take ‘em out,” he answers easily, “like I always do.”

“You’d be slow.” Damien is pressing too hard at his shoulder again. He’d showered the blood off hours ago, and never bothered to sort his hair out afterwards; it flops, inky black and soft-looking, over his forehead as he moves. It makes him look smaller, Eliot thinks. Younger, maybe. 

“Damien.” He reaches over and wraps his fingers around the man’s wrist. Gentle. Feels the pulse fluttering away there. _Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump._ “Hey.”

Damien’s eyes are dark and a little wide and there’s something brittle there, something like fear, and it hits Eliot like a physical blow, how much he never wants to see this man afraid, not for any reason. Damien Moreau buys governments and bankrolls terrorists and orders hits over breakfast like it’s nothing. He sees torture as a tool and people as objects. He is, objectively speaking, one of the worst human beings Eliot’s ever met.

“Unless they put a bullet in my head,” Eliot says, low like a vow, hand tightening around Damien’s wrist, “no one’s gettin’ to you. Not unless they get lucky and kill me quick. I could be half-dead and I’d still—no one’s gettin’ anywhere near you.”

Damien’s lips quirk up into the shadow of a smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes. 

**

 _The white hat really doesn't suit you,_ Moreau tells him _, but I love the hair._

Eliot wants to laugh at it, the fucking absurdity of it, that he’s fought this hard for this long just to be keelhauled right back here. Damien in his ear and death on the horizon. He’s spent three years being good, helping and healing and trying to put distance between his body and the things he’s done; but Eliot’s past is a living, breathing thing, and it will follow him wherever he runs until it kills him. He’s been waiting for it to kill him. 

It’s almost a relief, now, that it finally will. That he can stop running.

“So, we just have to get to that door,” Nate is saying, and somewhere underneath the dread and the knowledge that it’s over, Eliot feels a rush of warm affection; Nate’s still thinking. Nate’s still looking for an end to this where nobody dies. Nate’ll always try to find a way around breaking Eliot, if he can. 

He can’t, this time. 

Moreau’s trapped them here, and Eliot’s spent a lot of nights lying awake and thinking of how happy it would make him, to go out like this. Keeping his team safe. Making it mean something. 

“Are you sure you can actually take down Moreau?”

“Absolutely.”

Eliot has always had a sharp-fanged thing that lives in his chest, and it’s been singing _let me, let me, let me_ for years. 

He picks up the gun, and thinks, _okay_. 

The worst violence he does in five years, he does for his team, and he does it well.

**

Eliot doesn’t die. Nate has a plan. Moreau has a gun.

“You got one shot,” Eliot tells him. 

He doesn’t mean to be saying _kill me, kill me, while you’ve still got the chance,_ but this can only end with one of them dead and in about four seconds he’ll be close enough to do the things he’s been planning—bloody and unwilling in the back of his mind—for six fucking months. _Do it quick, ‘cause I’m finally desperate enough to go through with it._ The monster is still awake in his chest, and it’s finally had its taste of blood, and Eliot’s cut that glittering thread of self-control for _nothing_. 

_Kill me, kill me, kill me._

Eliot doesn’t die. Nate holds him back. Moreau gets away. 

The plane takes off for San Lorenzo. 

**

“The rest of the team—they don't need to know what I did.” 

It’s not true, he thinks at the hotel later, after emptying his stomach into the toilet once or twice. Scrubbing the blood off. Splashing cold water onto his face and trying to recognize himself in the bathroom mirror again. It feels like having a funeral for himself; like he’s grieving five years of unlearning and feeling and becoming a person again. Like he’s washed it right down the drain with all that blood and oil.

They should know. They deserve that honesty from him, after all of this, after what he’s let them walk into unprepared.

But Eliot is a bad person, who does bad things, and he isn’t gonna tell them about this one. Not if he can get away with it. Not if hiding the new blood under his fingernails means that maybe, just maybe, they’ll still keep him.

**

He’s in the Interview Room under the villa in San Lorenzo—or somewhere that looks like it, at least. An empty concrete box dug into the earth; cold, damp, lit up in fluorescent blue-white. Eliot is standing over the metal basin in the middle of the room. He is standing over a man’s shuddering body. He is holding his head underwater. 

The concrete is wet. The water is bleeding into his boots. 

Something is wrong.

Eliot doesn’t know why he’s doing this. He didn’t think he did this kind of thing anymore. The water is icy cold and the man is thrashing desperately under him and he’s sure he has a reason. Maybe Damien has a reason. He must, if Eliot’s doing this, digging his fingers into the warm, dark skin at the base of the man’s neck and watching the water slosh over the sides of the basin. It echoes off concrete, loud, loud, loud, and Eliot is surrounded by the sounds of splashing and struggling and the awful gurgle of water in lung. Something is wrong.

It smells like chlorine. 

He drags the man’s head upwards, out of the water, and he coughs and splutters like he’s trying to dislodge his own lungs, and Eliot tries to remember the questions he should be asking. Something is wrong. _Maybe_ , he thinks, listening to the man’s ragged wet gasping, _there aren’t any questions_. Maybe this is one of the simple ones, punishment with no goal but to take a human being and break them down into fear and meat. 

He can do that. He’s good at that, even though he’s pretty sure he doesn’t do things like this anymore. Doesn’t hurt for the sake of hurting.

“Eliot,” Hardison chokes out under him, shivering, chest heaving, “Eliot, stop—”

 _Oh,_ like a blade between the ribs. 

He tries to let go. He can’t. His hands force Hardison’s head back under the surface. _Oh, God._

He can’t be doing this. He can’t move. He can’t be doing this. Hardison is convulsing under him, terrified and soaking wet and drowning, and Eliot is not in control of his own body. Hardison is drowning. Hardison is drowning, and Eliot is holding him under, grip firm and tight like a vice, and he can’t let go, and Eliot’s heartbeat is hot and loud in his ears—

 _Please,_ he thinks. _Please—_

The fear yanks him awake like the hard pull of a hook; mind back into body, body back into his hotel room in DC, lit up only by the flickering of the TV. 

He’d been asleep on top of the duvet. He doesn’t remember falling asleep. His body is trembling and soaked in sweat and he thinks he might be sick.

“Fuck.” It comes out hoarse and frayed. “ _Fuck_.” 

He’d made the right choice, bringing Hardison to the pool, he knows. It’d been the only choice. That doesn’t seem even halfway good enough now, leaning his elbows onto his knees, curled in on himself and trying to catch his breath. His mouth tastes like chlorine. Metal. Bile. His stomach lurches. _You risked my life—_

Eliot scrubs at his face with the hem of his damp tank top, and for a second, he’s dangerously close to crying. 

He just wants some sleep, is all. He just wants some fucking _sleep_ , just for an hour, just for his brain to shut up and quit making his life hell for long enough that his eyes don’t burn and his body doesn’t ache and his heartbeat feels steady again. Wants more than anything to be more than the sum of the things he’s done. 

It’s been six goddamn months of this, of waking up in a cold sweat and wanting to scream into his pillow until his throat is raw and his head is empty. They’ve gone after Moreau. They’ve failed. He’s cut the glittering thread he spent five years weaving to hold himself in check. And he knows it isn’t finished, and he knows he’s only added more onto the pile of shit he’s going to carry guilt over for the rest of his life, and he knows when you get right down to it that he deserves to have to deal with this, but _God_. God. He is worn and threadbare and coming apart.

Eliot digs around behind the pillows for his phone. He squints through the blinding light of the screen for the time. 03:14, it says, in thin black letters, and he’d really love to turn the brightness down, only it’s a new burner, and he hasn’t figured out how to, yet. He could ask Hardis—

_—and he can’t move, he can’t, because Moreau is watching, and Hardison is drowning behind him, and the room smells like chlorine, and—_

Fear, bright and sharp, sparks at the base of his skull. He stares down at his hands. His hair is wet and sticking to his neck. He screws his eyes shut. 

Eliot’s on his feet and headed for the door before he knows what he’s doing. 

The lights in the hall outside are on automatic, motion detection, and they flicker to life at the sight of him. Everything else is still and quiet. Everyone else is asleep. His feet are bare on the grimy carpet, and he should not be doing this—it’s irrational, because Hardison is fine, and he knows this, he saw him downstairs just a few hours ago—only, well. 

His mouth still tastes like chlorine, is all.

He comes to a stop in front of Hardison’s room. Knuckles on wood. _Knock, knock, knock._ Listens to the hum of the building. Waits. Hardison’s footsteps—heavy, gangly, a little clumsy—cross the room. They pause by the door. Looking through the peephole, probably. Considering. 

The door swings open. 

Hardison is alive, and real, and right in front of him, and the fear dies down to a low simmer. Hardison's fine. He's fine. 

“What happened?” Hardison asks. He’s bleary-eyed and the room is dark behind him and he’s in his pyjamas, like maybe he’s just gotten out of bed, which, fuck, of course he has, it’s three in the fucking morning, and Eliot is an asshole. 

“Nothin’. Uh.” Eliot clears his throat. He is suddenly very, very awake, and knows what he must look like, wet hair still sticking to his face, barefoot, eyes red-rimmed and wild. “Was just—” he gestures vaguely at the hallway, and then Hardison, and then himself. 

Hardison stares at him. Sleepy. Unimpressed. “You were just…”

“Shit,” says Eliot, and Hardison’s eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline. “I was just gonna—I had—go back to bed, man, I dunno. I’ll see you in the mornin’.” 

“You woke me up...to tell me to go back to bed.” Slowly, like Eliot is a child. 

“Yeah. ‘M sorry.”

“For waking me up.”

“Yeah. And—yeah.” Silence stretches out between them. 

And Eliot is _tired_. Eliot is so goddamn tired, and he’s sold something of himself that was never supposed to be for sale again, and Moreau is probably drinking wine in San Lorenzo right now, is probably watching the sun go down through his office window and feeling no more threatened than he did six months ago. He’d been waiting to collapse in on himself earlier—by the pool, with Moreau’s eyes pinning him in place—but he thinks it might’ve just been delayed to right now, right here, in the hallway between their hotel rooms, carpet rough on his bare feet, tracing the lettering of Hardison’s Lord of the Rings t-shirt with his eyes and thinking about water in lungs and—

“Eliot,” Hardison says. Eliot blinks. There’s a strange rushing sound in his ears. He feels very far away from his body.

“Mm?”

“Man, do you...do you wanna come inside?” Hardison’s eyes are dark and he sounds like safety and Eliot sways on his feet a little.

“Yeah?” His voice cracks. “Yeah, I—okay.”

Hardison doesn’t turn the light on. He sits on the edge of the bed, and Eliot settles onto the floor with the wall at his back—solid, solid, safe—and they listen to the low hum of electronics and fans and whatever else under the silence around them. 

“I wasn’t gonna let him kill you,” Eliot says, a minute or an hour later, voice low like maybe Hardison won’t hear him over the dark and the sound of his own breathing.

“What?” 

“The—at the pool. I just...I don’t want you thinkin’ that I’d just—I wasn’t gonna let him—” He rubs at his eyes. “I wasn’t gonna let you _die_ , Hardison.”

There’s a long silence.

"I'm sorry," he tries.

“No, that’s...you know, that’s interesting, ‘cause I was gonna ask you about that.” Hardison’s voice is carefully light. “‘Cause you didn’t even look at me, man. I could see you. The whole time. You didn’t move.”

“I was—”

“You didn’t move, Eliot. _At all._ ”

Eliot’s jaw works silently for a moment. “What d’you think would’ve happened?” he says eventually, staring down at the vague shape of his own hands in his lap, hidden under shadows and velvet dark. “If I’d jumped in, I mean. Really, honest to God. How d’you think that would’ve gone for either of us?”

“I’m not saying you should’ve just—”

“Or if I’d flinched, then, and he’d put it together that I—that we’re—that it wasn’t just a job, for me, that I was scared. You think that would’ve been better?”

“Maybe. I dunno. You know the guy better than I do.”

And that aches, but it’s fair, so he nods. “Yeah.”

“Yeah. And you didn’t mention it.”

“No.”

“And you didn’t come get me.”

“‘Cause I was fuckin’ countin’, Hardison, I know how long somebody has when they’re down there, before they—how much time they have. I wasn’t gonna let you _die_. I was countin’.” 

He listens to Hardison think. Listens to the comforting sound of his breathing, _in-out, in-out_ , steady and slow. 

“You knew how long,” Hardison says. It’s not really a question. He answers anyway.

“Yeah.”

“‘Cause you’ve done that before. For him.”

His heart is beating faster, now. It’s still not really a question. “Yeah.” 

He waits for the rest, for the axe to come down, for Hardison to ask about the things he’s done—the things he can’t seem to stop doing, because life is always going to put bodies in his path, and Eliot is always going to cut right through them, because that’s the loop he’s stuck in. Because that’s how he’s wired, maybe.

“Why’d you bring _me?”_ Hardison asks instead, and Eliot is too tired to be anything but honest, so he tells him. Tells him about the fear. About the trust he has in Hardison, and how he knows Hardison trusts him, too _(trusted_ , he corrects himself mid-sentence, _trusted)_. How he’d decided to hurt him _because_ of that, not in spite of it. About the fear. About the fear. About running for a year and a half and never feeling any further away from what was chasing him. Taking a cab to the airport three months ago and trying to work up the nerve to handle Moreau himself. 

Failing. Always, always failing.

His voice is splintering like rotting wood by the end of it, and he doesn’t notice he’s shaking until Hardison’s hand comes down to stroke his shoulder. Slow circles. Warm, warm, warm. 

“Alright, hey,” Hardison tells him, “shit. Alright.”

“’M sorry.”

“I know. I...I get it, I think, at least." He pauses. "Look...this whole thing with Moreau, we'll figure it out. Genius, remember?” He nudges Eliot's foot with his own, and Eliot smiles in spite of himself. “It’s okay, El.”

They sit in the safety of the dark for a long moment. He can see Hardison’s silhouette, now that his eyes have adjusted a little. He wishes he could see his face.

“Hey, Hardison?”

“Yeah, man, what’s up?”

“...Can you show me how to do that brightness thingy on my phone again?”

And Hardison laughs—quiet, shaky, but still good—and it warms something under Eliot’s ribcage, the sound of it. The low rumble. Makes him feel a little more real. He knows they’re not okay, not yet; but Eliot spends the quiet hours before sunrise with a solid wall at his back, safe, listening to the even tide of Hardison’s breathing as he falls back to sleep—warm and alive in his bed, alive, alive—and it holds him together. Just for now. Just for a little while longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Thank you for sticking with me, I know this chapter was a little darker than the others—and longer, too. Next stop, San Lorenzo (and some Eliot cooking content, because the boy deserves a moment of peace)! 
> 
> I treasure all comments and kudos, and I hope you're all staying safe out there. <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eliot cooks. That's it that's all. 
> 
> Thank you to coffeesuperhero for reading this in advance <3

He means to make them Belgian waffles, when they get back to Boston. 

It’s a plan he puts together on the plane.

It goes like this: Eliot, staring blankly out the window for two and a half hours. Eliot, apropos of absolutely nothing, turning to Parker—sitting as close to him as the airplane seats allow and then some—and saying, “Hey, what if I made waffles?” Jaw tight, voice hoarse. 

Parker, beaming and listing topping ideas, like he’d known she would; Eliot nodding, and Eliot letting himself slip back out of his body, and Eliot staring out the window for the rest of the flight. 

So, he means to do it. To make waffles, that is. 

Light and fluffy and sweet, with some orange zest in them, like Hardison likes. First thing in the morning, when they’re all supposed to meet over at Nate’s to go over everything. They can ask, and he can answer, and he can keep his hands busy so they don’t shake. Make himself useful and hope breakfast tastes like some kind of an apology.

Only—

Well—

Eliot gets back to his place, and it’s empty, and _he’s_ empty—cold and numb and so fucking hollow, like he hasn’t been in years, and his hands don’t feel like they’re his, and his head is full of static, and he can’t catch his breath. Dead in a living body. 

So. 

He spends three hours laying into his punching bag until he’s knocked himself back into his bones again, solid and hurting, hands stinging enough that he knows who they belong to. He works the numbness into a dull ache behind his ribs, and then tries to wash his own skin off in the scalding heat of the shower, and by the time he’s done with that—raw and pink and awake again—it’s crept past morning and into late afternoon.

When he remembers to check his phone, he’s got four missed calls and half a dozen text messages from his team, but no voicemails, so no one’s died. 

Eliot throws on whatever clothes are clean and digs through his fridge for alternatives. He’ll still bring the things for waffles, just in case, but he’ll be prepared to make dinner, too, if they want that from him instead. Paella, maybe. Or—

He pauses, staring into his fridge. 

They’ll be going to San Lorenzo, soon. There are things from the island that he’s missed. That he’d liked, when he was there. Making one of them for his team, now that he knows how, could help...tie everything together, maybe. Make it solid. Make the good parts less fragile and the bad parts less sore. 

He nods to himself, quick and jerky. Fideuà, then. He’s got seafood waiting to be eaten by someone with an appetite. Noodles. The rest of it.

He digs his coolers out from the closet, and packs them full of ice and ingredients, and heads over to Nate’s place five hours late.

**

His knee is bruised to the bone, dark and spreading and stiffening the joint even a full five days after he’d cracked it on asphalt. It’s a grainy, sand-in-wound kind of pain. Eliot’s had worse injuries, and he can still walk on it, and he’s not a baby; it’s only an issue now that he’s been kneeling in front of Damien’s desk for over an hour. 

They’re in San Lorenzo for the winter, sun filtering watery and unsympathetic through the windows, and he’s not sure if Damien knows about the knee. He’s not sure it matters. 

He grits his teeth. Shifts his weight. 

Damien watches him like a hawk watches a mouse, and sips his scotch like he isn’t really tasting it, and doesn’t say a word. Eliot’s disappointed him, and the silence is a physical weight on his body—calm before storm, dirt on grave, protesting bone about to break.

“I’m sorry,” Eliot says. It’s the wrong choice, he knows; Damien’s never put much stock into apologies. 

They’ve lost three men, the shipment, and the second half of their paychecks, and it wasn’t Eliot’s fault. Not completely. He’s not sure that matters, either; Damien puts as much stock into fairness and fault as he does into apologies, and Eliot’s easy for him to get his hands on and hurt. So, Eliot kneels. Lowers himself down to the dark hardwood and stays there, humble, humble, quiet, and hopes for something like forgiveness. 

Damien sips his scotch. Pulls him apart with his eyes and sorts the pieces into piles: _useful_ and _useless._ The _useless_ pile’s growing with every passing second.

“Let me fix it,” Eliot tries again. Shifts his weight again. Grips his wrist a little harder behind his back in an effort to balance out the hum of pain building under his kneecap. 

“You’re not in any position to be making demands.” 

“No.” He swallows. “No, I’m askin’. I want to fix it. Let me fix it.” 

Eliot’s been an extension of Damien’s own hand for the past two and a half years, so he knows what’s going to happen before it does; sees the movement telegraphed in the sharp line of the man’s shoulders, the tight curl of his fingers around the glass, knuckles white. Doesn’t bother to brace himself.

The air shifts; the _clink_ of glass on wood—

—Damien’s hands are on him, twisting into his hair and _pulling_ , pain sparking up along his scalp. Along the twist of his spine. His fingers grip Eliot’s jaw like a vice. Force his head back to look him in the eye. 

“Do you _really_ think I care about what you _want_ , right now?” Damien hisses, eyes hard and glittering. Eliot can feel his breath on his skin. He tightens his fist in Eliot’s hair. “Hm?”

It should be terrifying, he notes dully in the back of his mind; heartbeat fluttering in his ears, throat bared, breathing harshly through his nose. Damien’s dark eyes boring into his. He’s watched Damien kill people; knows he likes to hurt for the sake of hurting; knows he’ll die like this someday, looking into his eyes, on his knees, having done wrong. He should be terrified. 

But Eliot’s been sitting with the quiet and the tension pressing on his skin for over an hour, and Damien’s hands just feel like something sweet and burning, in the wake of all that _nothing_. The glow of a dwindling campfire. Any fear is drowned out by the relief in it, in being made to look up at Damien’s anger; he soaks it in, sunflower to sun. 

And Eliot is honest with Damien, so he calls his bluff and says, “Yes.” 

Damien blinks. His face does something complicated, a fluid twist between blank and livid and hopelessly fond. And then his hands are loosening, lips twisting up into a resigned smile. 

“Well.” He runs his thumb along Eliot’s jaw. Squints. “Fine. You have three days. Fix it.”

And Eliot smiles. And Eliot does.

**

“Hey,” says Nate from the armchair, not looking up from the papers he’s leafing through. “Nice of you to show up.” 

He looks as tired as Eliot feels. 

The coffee table is half-buried under a mess of articles and mugshots and maps of a familiar coastline, four mugs abandoned on top of it all like they’ve given up on finding anything useful. Sophie’s fast asleep on the couch, an open folder spilling photographs across her lap. Chapman’s flat eyes stare out at him.

“I brought food,” says Eliot, making his way to the kitchen and hoisting the coolers up onto the counter with a grunt. “Or. Well. I brought ingredients. I’m gonna make food.”

“Right, right. Parker said something about waffles?” 

“Mm. Or somethin’ for dinner, if you’d rather have that, I dunno. Brought stuff to make both.” He starts unpacking. He can feel Nate’s eyes on the back of his neck. “Parker ‘n Hardison?”

“Went to grab their things. Dinner sounds nice.” 

Eliot pauses, bag of mussels in hand, and turns to frown at Nate. “Things?”

Nate grabs a mug off the coffee table and sips. Pulls a face. Stone cold, by now, probably. “We were all thinking of camping out here for a little bit. You know, since we’ve poked the bear with a stick and all. Easier to keep track of everybody.” He shrugs. “Soph’s idea.”

“Strength in numbers,” says Sophie’s sleep-muffled voice from the couch, head peeking over the cushions to blink at Eliot. “You’re here.” Her eyes drift down to his hands, bruised and stiff where they’re clutching a bag of noodles. “Did something happen?”

“Nah,” Eliot says. “I was handlin’ some stuff. Didn’t mean to take so long.” 

“Are you okay?”

He sighs. “So. Sleepover, huh?” He tucks the noodles on top of the microwave to make room for the cutting board. 

Sophie makes a soft humming sound under her breath. “Strength in numbers,” she repeats, and gives Nate a look Eliot can’t read from here.

 _Or eggs in one basket_ , Eliot thinks but doesn’t say. He wants them to feel safe. If crashing on Nate’s couch in a pile and letting Eliot watch the door all night’ll do that for them, he won’t argue. Eliot’s been a guard dog before; he wouldn’t mind doing it for them, too. Checking exits all night. Listening to them breathe. Putting his body between them and anyone wanting to do them harm. He’d be happy to do it.

Nate sets his mug down on the coffee table with a dull _clink_ , ceramic on wood. “So, about Moreau,” he begins, and Sophie shifts on the couch, and Eliot has to consciously stop himself from crushing the orange in his hand, body tensing up like he’s getting ready to get hit. 

“Wait,” he says. “Wait, could you—just—let me get started, on this, and then while I’m—then we’ll talk about it, alright?” 

“Alright,” Nate says, slowly, brow furrowing. Eliot nods jerkily and goes back to unpacking.

**

It’s not a good talk. 

Nate wants to know about Moreau, and Sophie wants to listen, and Eliot wants to cut vegetables and not go into this even a little bit, but it’s okay. It’s okay, and Eliot’s okay, because Eliot is cooking; plenty of bad things have happened to Eliot while he’s been holding a knife, but nothing bad has ever happened to Eliot while he’s cooking. It’s safe. It’s the last clean thing. 

“So...you’re not going to tell me _anything_ , is what you’re saying.” 

Nate isn’t happy. Eliot finishes chopping the onions with a little more force than he needs to, and gets them softening in the pot with a little olive oil. 

“Personal shit’s off the table, Nate,” says Eliot, starting on the garlic, now. It’s a good smell, garlic. Tangible. “You wanna know who he worked with? Business transactions? Where he keeps his money? Fine, I’ll write you up a list.”

“But if I ask—”

“But if you ask about his fuckin’ family or whatever else you’re—” He stops chopping. Takes a deep breath around the brittle, panicky thing in his chest. Adds another clove to the pile. “If the team ever split up, Nate, I wouldn’t go tellin’ whoever I worked for next about Parker’s brother or...Sam, or anythin’ like that. I’m not doin’ it.” 

_Chop, chop, chop._ Blade to board. The kind of clean, even cuts that Toby’d always compliment him on, when he’d first started with him. It’s a good movement, helpful in its repetition. Next up, the shrimp. After that, once the onions are soft and clear and good, he can add everything to the pot. Season. Cook it down. Add the water and the mussels and bring it to a boil.

It’s good. It’s nice. It’s nice having clear steps to follow, where no one’ll get hurt if he messes it up. He’ll add a little extra hot pepper for Parker, maybe; she likes spice.

“It’s not like I’m still...you know, loyal to him, or anythin’. It’s not like that. Just…” He frowns into the pot, at the onions, at the garlic. _It’s not that he still owns me_ , he can’t say, because he’s already wearing his shame on his skin and he’s not about to confess to being that far deep in with the worst person he’s ever crossed paths with. The worst person any of them have ever crossed paths with, he’s willing to bet.

“Just that you are, a little?” Nate asks. He sounds almost sympathetic. Eliot bristles anyway.

“No, I’m not, Nate, thanks.” Sharp like the knife in his hand. He puts it down, keeps his hands open and non-threatening. Breathes through it. “But he trusted me, then, just like y’all trusted me, and I’m not gonna go handin’ out shit he told me in confidence. I’m not askin’ you to get it, Nate, I just need you to respect it.”

Eliot can tell from the type of quiet that follows that Nate and Sophie are having one of their weird silent conversations on the couch. His input isn’t needed for a minute; he lets himself pick up the knife again, focuses on softening onions and measuring out coriander. He starts on deveining the shrimp. It’s a good task; they’re small, and he needs to hold his hands steady to make sure he doesn’t tear them apart. Needs to be gentle. 

“Okay,” says Nate, and something uncoils behind Eliot’s ribs. “Okay. If we can’t go after the man, we’ll go after what he depends on. What does he still have access to?”

**

By the time Parker and Hardison come back—Hardison through the door, Parker from somewhere in the apartment like she’d been there the whole time, bags in hand—Eliot’s making decent headway on the Fideuà. 

Nate’s apartment feels full in a way it hadn’t before, and smells like broth; like brine and spice and something warm. Sun and ocean, just like he remembers. He’s already baked the noodles, and all that’s left to do is ladle the broth over them to simmer and put it all together.

“Oh, hey,” says Hardison. “You guys found an Eliot.” Eliot grunts in response.

“What happened to waffles?” Parker asks, face scrunched up into a frown, carrying what looks like her weight in rope and climbing gear. “You said waffles. That’s not waffles.”

He stirs the broth, and something uneasy twists in his stomach. “It’s—I can make waffles, too, Parker, I brought the stuff for ‘em.”

“Then why aren’t you making waffles?” She drops her gear on the couch in a pile and crosses the room in graceful, easy strides, coming to a halt at Eliot’s shoulder. Too close, like she always is. She sniffs. His jaw tightens. 

“Dinner first, then waffles. You’ll like this. I made it spicy.” He hands her a spoon to try some of the broth, and doesn’t let his hands shake. “Blow on it so you don’t burn your—okay.”

Parker squints. Eliot waits. The uneasy twisting feeling goes thick and molten, and he wonders if maybe he’s messed this up, too, like everything else—and then Parker beams, and it all melts away like it was never there.

“It makes my mouth hurt. I like it. Waffles after, though, like you promised.”

“I told you to blow on—” he sighs. Takes the spoon back and tosses it into the dishwasher. “Fine. Go move your stuff off the couch, Sophie’s sleepin’ there.”

**

“How ‘bout this one?” Eliot picks another folder from the pile on the table. “Mark Acevedo, twenty-five, caucasian. Pretty generic-looking. Three tours with the army.”

“Mm. And after?”

It’s been raining for three days. Damien likes to keep the windows open during storms, because he’s an insane person; the penthouse is mostly windows, also because he’s an insane person, and the water echoes over glass and tile like a million tiny footsteps. _Listen to it, Eliot,_ he’ll say, face turned upwards, content and strange and somehow younger. _Stop thinking so much._

The damp air makes Eliot’s hair and the paper in his hands curl up, and that’s enough to outweigh any fondness on his end.

Chapman’s spent the night burying six of their people—or, well, not burying. _Disposing of,_ like stepping into slippers and dragging trash out to the curb once the sun’s gone down, plastic and styrofoam instead of blood and meat and bone. Same difference, in the end; Eliot devotes the better part of his weekend to leafing through piles of ill-gotten personal histories and trying to find them a couple of manageable replacement options. It’s slow going. 

“Mostly freelancing…” He skims a few pages. Two hits in Stuttgart, a few in Guadalajara. At least one entry-level kidnapping. “Nothing notable, but he did some wetwork for...those gun runners, the ones that—the Nowak twins, a year or so ago. Kept him on retainer and everythin’.” 

“So we’re taking the Nowaks’ leftovers, now.” Damien laughs under his breath from where he’s draped, elegant and boneless, across the couch. Black silk bathrobe. Wine breathing on the coffee table. Rain pattering on the roof. “Any education?”

“High school.”

“Living relatives?” Damien yawns. Stretches out like an overgrown cat—like a panther, maybe; shifting muscle, dark silk and dark hair and dark eyes—and watches Eliot watch him. Smiles, slow and knowing. 

Eliot swallows and drags his eyes back to the paper. “He, uh, no, it was—single dad. Died four or five years ago. No siblings.”

“Hm. Good so far. Uneducated, isolated, out of a job.” He claps his hands together and sits up in one fluid movement, grinning. “Very promising. Have Radovan pick him up for an audition.”

“Will do.” Eliot tosses Mark Acevedo into the Keep pile, and doesn’t think about what this’ll do to the man’s life, and doesn’t think about Damien and his people having this same conversation about him a few years back. Making ticks down the list. _Uneducated, isolated, out of a job_. “Okay. Two down, four to go.”

**

Eliot gathers his people around the dining table, and ladles the Fideuà out onto the dishes in front of them. Mussels, noodles, broth. Shrimp. Parsley from his balcony herb garden, and some lemon and orange zest, and a spoonful of allioli. It smells like somewhere he hasn’t been in years. 

“So, there’s...I’ve got a friend in San Lorenzo. A General. Helped get me out. Let me—” he stops to add a little more onto Parker’s plate, who’s already started picking noodles off of Hardison’s. “Let me call him, okay? He might be able to help. Let me try to...I dunno, fix this. ”

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting. Hesitation, maybe. For them to all stop and look at each other and decide whether or not they trust any friend of his. Whether or not they trust him. 

He’s not expecting Nate to nod easily and go, “That’d be great, if you’re okay reaching out. What’s in this?” And point at the noodles with his fork, and ask Eliot absolutely nothing else about San Lorenzo or any contacts he might still have there.

Parker makes happy noises and plays with the shrimp in her bowl, and Sophie asks questions about the broth, and Hardison picks at the mussels but devours everything else, and it makes him feel warm. It tastes like it’s supposed to, and they like it, and he’s done something right. They’re going to let him fix this. 

The past few days—months, even—have been a nauseating blur of fear. He’s been dragged through to see the other side with Nate’s hand on his shoulder, eyes wild, worn thin and brittle and see-through. 

He’s crossed the most important line he’s ever drawn for himself. 

He’s become something he’d never wanted to be again.

But here, in Nate’s dining room, watching his team, and eating something good he’s made with his hands, it’s easy to let himself think that everything might turn out okay, after all. If they get lucky, maybe.

**

He makes Parker her Belgian waffles after dinner, because the girl’s a bottomless pit; light and fluffy and sweet, with some orange zest in them, like Hardison likes. Watches their faces light up and reminds himself that he’s good for things that don’t make his skin crawl.

Later, once the sun’s gone down, Nate drags the mattress in from the spare room. They roll out sleeping bags. They dim the lights. 

Eliot checks sight lines and vantage points and locks on every exit. Finds a spot where he can see most of the apartment and the door at the same time. Hardison has Star Wars pyjamas, and Sophie drools in her sleep, and the world is loud and bloody and violent, but this is good. They’re good. _Anyone who ever wants to kill you,_ he thinks, solid and warm in his chest, _is gonna have to kill me first._

He listens to the easy sounds of them breathing, and smiles, and watches the sky melt from navy to pink to gold through the window.

**

Eliot has killed a lot of people, but he’s seen more die. Just off to the side, looking, watching. Running towards them and being too late. Tied to a chair and made still. Held back by orders, standing on a lawn and watching windows light up with muzzle flashes. 

Looking. Watching. Looking.

He’s learned over the years to sit with the helplessness in it. Breathe through it. Do what you can, and when there’s nothing left to do, sit, and look, and watch, and don’t let it break you. 

The problem is that his team doesn’t let him be helpless, anymore; they chatter in his ear and plan for worst-case scenarios and keep each other safe. They ask of him only what he can handle, and not too much more. They don’t let him be helpless. He’s out of practice. 

So, Eliot calls General Flores, and trusts that Hardison can keep the call safe, and asks the man to put himself in danger to help them do what Eliot’s never been able to stomach doing on his own. Asks him to help them end this.

It goes wrong. Everything goes wrong, just like it was always going to. He watches them drag Flores offscreen from the other side of the world, and watches Moreau’s face come into view, and he doesn’t hear a single thing over the ringing in his ears. It’s like falling out of his body. “You can’t,” he thinks he says, like a child, like there’s ever been a sin Damien wasn’t fond of. 

Moreau can, and Moreau will, and he’ll smile while he does it.

Eliot’s breathing hard and shaking, fear warring with shame in his stomach, warring with anger, and his head is full of static, and there’s nowhere at all that’ll ever be safe, so long as Moreau’s alive. So long as Moreau’s weaving his web around the whole fucking world and twisting the piece of Eliot he owns in his hands, smiling, smiling, taking what he wants and doing what he wants and salting the earth behind him.

So long as Eliot keeps trying to cling, child to the side of an upturned boat, to some kind of hope that this’ll end well for anyone.

 _Okay_ , he thinks. Moreau’s eyes are dark. His smile is bright. _Okay_. It sounds like the end of a long, long rope.

He goes back to his place and hits the bag ‘til he doesn’t feel like running and running and running, and then sits on his living room floor and draws out hotel floor layouts from memory. Maps out escape routes. Prints out pictures of Moreau’s security detail from Hardison’s files, and breaks their faces down into their defining features with sharpie, and memorizes how they walk from the security feeds. 

_Anyone who ever wants to kill you,_ he thinks—

**

“Why haven’t you killed me, yet, Spencer?” Flores asks him. 

They’re in his office. Eliot has been sent to make it look like some kind of accident, and instead he’s sitting in the chair across from Flores’ desk and watching his own hands shake.

It’s June, and everything is ending.

“I don’t—I’m not sure yet,” Eliot admits. He’s hit some kind of invisible barrier, and he can’t tell what shape it’s in, yet; how far it stretches, why it’s _here_ of all places. His voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to him. Like someone else is wearing his body and speaking through his mouth, thin and watery and uncertain. “Maybe I will, in a minute.” 

Flores nods, unsurprised. “And my security team...are they…?”

Eliot shakes his head. “Knocked ‘em out.” 

“Hm. So, you have been sent here to kill me...and to kill my people, most likely, given how your employer usually operates”—Eliot nods—“and you’ve done neither.” 

“Guess not.”

“This doesn’t look too good for you, Commander.” Flores circles the desk to pour two glasses of scotch. He holds out one for Eliot.

“Guess not,” Eliot says again. He stares blankly at the glass. Liquid amber swirling around and around and around. Flores has a wedding ring. “You should get out of the country, sir. And your family. Just ‘cause I’m not doin’ it doesn’t mean somebody else won’t.”

“That is likely true.” Flores sighs and sets the glass down onto the wood of his desk. 

Eliot listens in as he makes the phone call from his office’s secure line. Reassures his wife. Makes plans. He looks lighter, when he hangs up. Like a man who knows what he’s doing.

“They will be out of the country within the hour,” he says.

“That’s good,” says Eliot. “I’m not gonna kill you, either, in case you were still wonderin’.”

“That’s good,” says Flores. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

There’s a picture of a little girl in a yellow dress on Flores’ desk, blowing bubbles and laughing. She’s missing teeth. She’s about the age Eliot’s nephew should be, if he’s done his math right. 

“Now, what will you do, Spencer? Now that you’ve warned me?”

Eliot blinks and tears his eyes away from the photograph. “What d’you mean?” 

“Well, he won’t be...Moreau isn’t exactly known for…” Flores looks exasperated. That, and something else, something harder to name—afraid, maybe, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, since Eliot’s not here to kill him anymore. “There will be repercussions for you, yes?”

And Eliot smiles, and picks up the scotch off the desk. It tastes like ash. Swallows. Nods. “He’s gonna kill me, I think.”

There’s a long, shaky silence. The air feels heavy. Eliot makes himself meet Flores’ eye.

Lawrence Flores—good man, war hero, first person Eliot’s seen in three years who’d known him before he’d become whatever he is now—is looking at him like he can see Eliot inside of himself, curled up and panicky under the numbness and the orders he’s been given, under the blood and the things he’s done. Like he’s a person. Like he might still be worth saving, if he plays his cards right. Eliot has no idea what to do with that.

“That’s twice you’ve saved my life, now, Spencer.”

“General, this does _not_ count as a—”

“You came here at great personal risk, to tell me that my family and I are in danger, fully believing you would die for it. I will count it as whatever I like.”

Eliot takes another sip of the scotch. “Okay.”

“I can help you leave the country.”

“That’d be very kind of you, General. Thank you. And then what?”

“And...then…?”

“Sir,” says Eliot, and it takes a lot of effort to keep his voice steady, “do you honestly think there’s anywhere I could ever run where he wouldn’t find me?”

Eliot has no delusions about his situation. He knows Flores is a test. It’s pass-fail; useful, yes or no, and Eliot’s chosen to fail. It’s maybe the first choice he’s made for himself in a year and a half. He’d expected it to feel more like...more. Like freedom, maybe. Less like digging a grave.

“You were a good man, when I knew you, Eliot Spencer,” Flores says, quiet and firm. “You’re a good man now. I’d hate to see you die for it.”

And Eliot wants, so badly that it makes his fucking chest ache, to be the person Flores sees under the rest of him. To be whatever he was, when they’d first met. Good. Better than he is now, at any rate. “I’m not,” he says, throat tight, voice breaking, “I’m—I’ve done things, for him, I’ve—”

“Maybe. But you could be,” Flores says, “if you wanted to.” And it sounds like _I know what you are, and it isn’t this._

Eliot gets on the plane. He starts running. He never really stops.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so Eliot did in fact cook, though technically we didn't quite get to San Lorenzo...listen...the food, it was more important...
> 
> Thanks for joining me on this chill pit stop before we go Moreau Hunting next chapter. All comments and kudos are cherished and treasured as always. Have a great week!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Warning for this chapter: there is a section starting with "it's June" that involves some self-harm-y stuff. It's more amateur-hour self-surgery than anything else, but it's there, so please proceed with caution if that's a possible trigger for you, etc etc. Take care <3]
> 
> Thank you to coffeesuperhero for reading this in advance, truly a hero <3

He’s white-knuckling it on the plane.

The fear is shaped like this: 

Moreau isn’t God, but his word is law, and his will is done, and his money has bought him a country to be king of. To step foot onto San Lorenzan soil is to be where the man’s eyes can see him. To be where his hands can touch. And it’s—it’s not fair to the island, exactly, ‘cause it’d been owned and used and taken by plenty of people before Moreau came and called it home, but Damien’s poison runs deep, there. Seeps into the groundwater. Stays in the flesh.

The fear is shaped like _this:_

Eliot spends five years washing Moreau out of his veins, and then six months mapping the man’s every move. He spends a year and a half running from him like he values his life, desperate and ashamed of the thing he’s been made into, and then quietly buckles himself into his seat and flies himself right back into the man’s territory, ‘cause Nate Ford asked and said _please_.

So, Eliot wants to panic. 

Or—no, _Eliot_ wants to stay calm, but his _body_ wants to panic. He can feel it ringing out like instinct, this fear; can feel his brain checking the readings, triangulating his location and doing the math and saying _hey asshole, what the fuck, run the other way._

Instead, he listens to Hardison talk. He has a team, now. He’s lucky. He focuses on the steady stream of Hardison’s voice, rambling about whatever new game he’s gotten into, talking with his hands. Grinning like Eliot’s still his friend and not someone who brought him as his plus one to an execution. 

It’s good, Hardison’s weird nervous chatter. It’s five hours of white noise. 

He closes his eyes, and forces his breathing steady, and waits for the plane to land.

**

It’s June. The motel has no air conditioning, and Eliot is digging a tracker out of his shoulder with a box cutter. 

He’s sunken his teeth into the hand that fed him—housed him, clothed him, commanded him—for three years. The plane had taken off from San Lorenzo and he’d lived; the plane had landed and one of Moreau’s men’d tried to put a bullet between his eyes and he’d lived; he’s standing on the cool tile of the bathroom in his underwear, alive, alive, alive, bleeding like he always seems to be and wondering if any of this is really worth the effort. 

It’s two minutes to midnight. Eliot’s been free for eighteen hours, and it doesn’t feel like any kind of freedom he’s ever hoped for, craning his neck to see what his hands are doing in the bathroom mirror. 

His problem is shaped like a tiny bead of metal and plastic, and he can only just feel it, buried beside his shoulder blade, if he digs his fingers into the muscle. It’s singing out his location to the man who owns him; _come find me, come find me, come find me. I’m far away and bleeding and I don’t know what I’m doing._ He can feel it. He can feel it.

He can’t fucking reach it. 

His fingers are slick and unsteady and Damien’d picked this place on purpose, he knows; had chosen this part of Eliot’s body for the fact that he can’t get to it easily on his own. He gets it. It’s smart. He’s breathing hard and he’s opened a series of dark, jagged lines into the meat of himself and he doesn’t know how much time he has left before someone comes through the door to kill him.

Chapman’d find it funny, probably. _Damien’s dog ran away. Thank god we’d had him microchipped._

His eyes sting. His hands are clumsy and sticky and red. He meets his own gaze in the mirror. 

**

He notices this first, stepping off the plane: the air in San Lorenzo smells the same. 

Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.

The sun soaks the world in gold and orange, sweet and bright like fruit. Their suitcases clatter over uneven cobblestone. White buildings. Terra cotta roofs. Ocean resting on the back of his tongue.

Eliot can’t enjoy any of it.

It’s mostly the fact that if he were in charge—still in charge—and some uppity fucking conman and his merry band of thieves had gone and decided to sic Interpol on Damien Moreau for crimes that _weren’t even his_ —well. They’d’ve been dead by morning. Moreau wouldn’t’ve even had to ask. He’d have brought the news home like a cat with a dead bird and said _aren’t you glad you have me._

But he’s not in charge, and he doesn’t know what Moreau’s men’ll do, not exactly. The airport in San Lorenzo is tiny, and Nate and Sophie are in all white, and the Italian says they’re still under the radar, but Eliot has never _once_ bet on Damien Moreau not knowing something, and he’s not about to start now. If it happens out here, like this, it’ll be quick; a muzzle flash from the top floor of a building; the glint of metal in a tourist’s hand, walking just a bit too close; the squeal of tires before the crack of bullet-leaving-barrel. It’ll be quick, if it happens here. Eliot’ll need to be quicker. He lets the monster in his chest sit close to the surface. Lets it coil up tight under his skin, hackles up. Eyes sharp. Trails behind his team, and watches, and listens. 

It’s comforting, almost, the hum of adrenaline; the solid certainty that the bad thing is going to happen. Not having to worry about _if_ and letting himself focus on _when_.

“Okay,” says Nate, squinting into the sun and sweating already. “Let’s go steal a country.”

It feels like a march to the gallows and a homecoming, all at once.

**

Nate lets him pick the hotel.

He does this, Eliot thinks, because he’d spent twenty-five minutes watching Eliot hide weapons on his body and gesture wildly at maps he’d labelled and circled in sharpie, before they’d left Boston. Listened to Eliot talk about things like body disposal and sightlines and—in a flat, monotone kind of voice that comes from somewhere deep in the back of his skull—the order in which Moreau’d want to kill them. 

(“It’ll be me either first or last,” Eliot tells him, flipping the ceramic knife in his hand, getting used to the weight of it. “Either he gets me out of the way so he can have a clear shot at any of you, ‘cause he knows I’ll kill whoever he sends, or he’ll leave me last so I’ll have to watch. Which he’ll go for’ll depend on his mood, but it’s one of those two. Then Hardison, and then probably Sophie—”

“Right,” Nate says, pale and wide-eyed like he finally after six months is understanding how much of a kill box he’s steered them into; like Eliot saying _when Moreau tries to kill us_ instead of _if_ has shaken something loose in him. “Right, okay. So we’ll have to...give him a reason not to.”)

So, he lets Eliot pick. 

The hotel Eliot goes for is a beacon of mediocrity. 

It’s just outside of the capital, close enough to walk to but not close enough to be particularly convenient. It’s just barely shitty enough to be off of Moreau’s personal radar, but not shitty enough to be notably useful if you’re keeping a low profile. It has one point of ingress per suite (two, if you’re Parker); easily defensible, and if they can get rooms high enough up—which, by greasing a couple palms and smiling like he hasn’t buried people two miles from here, Eliot guarantees—there aren’t any nearby buildings tall enough to get a decent sightline through the windows. It also has a pretty solid security system. If Eliot were on his own, this’d make it a clear no-go; Eliot, fortunately or unfortunately, is not on his own. Eliot has a Hardison.

Hardison hooks the security feeds up to his laptop, and sets up some kind of facial recognition alarm for the goons they’ve already ID’d, and Eliot claps him on the shoulder and acts like he isn’t bracing himself, doomsday clock at the back of his skull saying _tick, tick, tick, two minutes to midnight._

It’s not pessimism, that dread. It’s getting hit enough times that you learn to read it in someone’s shoulders, when it’s coming. 

It’s coming.

**

He’ll never really get it, having a pool when you’ve got property by the ocean. 

The villa is hidden between trees and guarded miles of empty land, but the new beach house is close enough to water that you can smell salt if you open the windows. Damien always opens the windows. He likes listening to the sound of it, the world; wind combing through dark leaves outside, plants piled high like the garden of Eden. 

It’s saltwater, the pool, because things are going well and Damien has more money piling up than he knows what to do with, and Eliot is bewilderingly content. The world is honeyed and warm where he soaks at the edge of the water, eyes closed, muscles loosening after a long week of collecting bruises, and it’s good. It’s so, so good. 

He’d never imagined he’d have the kind of life where he’d get to feel comfortable like this again—comfortable like _anything_ again—and it doesn’t make the numbness in his chest go away, but it’s still better than anything he’s had in years. The only person he can think of who’s worse than him likes him too much to kill him right now, and their empire is growing, sick and steady, and there’s no problem he can’t solve with a bullet. 

He’s carved out a place for himself, here. He fits in it like he fits nowhere else.

Eliot doesn’t tense up at the soft footsteps behind him; he knows Damien’s movements by heart, now, knows the shape of him by the shifting of his weight. The steady pattern of it. He’d know him by the sound of his breathing alone.

“Pool’s kinda dumb,” Eliot says. He can’t keep the smile out of his voice.

“Hm. You seem to be enjoying it well enough.” 

Water on skin. Breeze playing through dark leaves. Damien’s hand settling at the nape of his neck, feather-light and warm. 

And Eliot thinks, _I don’t deserve this_.

And Eliot thinks, _bury me here_. 

“I have work for you,” Damien murmurs. “You know, when you’re up to it.”

Eliot cracks an eye open. Glares into the sliver of light. “When I’m _up to it?”_

Damien huffs a laugh. “It’ll be...messier than the last few errands I’ve had for you, that’s all. I’d like to settle things with Nassar. Nothing time-sensitive, pet.” 

Torture, is what he means. Sending a message through blood and the breaking of bone. Eliot nods, and Damien’s fingers run through his hair, and he doesn’t feel any kind of anything about it. In a few years time, he’ll think back on this and a million conversations like it, and beat his own hands bloody into a heavy bag ‘til the sun comes up, like penance. Like punishment. Like it’ll do anything. It won’t be the violence that bothers him; death is death, and suffering is suffering, and he’s always been good at handing out both.

“‘M not busy,” Eliot says, easy, easy, leaning into the warmth of skin on skin. Pliant. “Just say the word.”

It won’t be the violence, no. 

It’ll be the willingness. It’ll be the willingness. 

**

Finding Flores isn’t hard, if you’ve lived the kind of life that leads to you having a working mental encyclopedia of everywhere Damien Moreau likes to keep prisoners. Last time Eliot’d been down in the tombs, there’d still been stairs; now, they’ve done some creative remodelling and turned the place into a promising little kill box. 

Flores is noble, like he always is, and he throws Eliot for a loop, like he always does. 

“These people you are with now, would you leave any of them behind? Ever?” 

And Eliot looks at Parker.

And Eliot thinks of Parker tucking her toes up under his thigh on the couch; thinks of her poking at him like he isn’t something dangerous she has to be afraid of; thinks of how she sits next to him like it’s a good place to be, and she’s not taking anything from him when she does it, aside from maybe his wallet now and then. Just closeness, just touch, no transaction. Thinks of Sophie. Hardison. Nate. And maybe his loyalty is cheap—maybe he’s been tying himself to anyone who’d have him for longer than he can remember, just to have someone hand him some kind of purpose and tell him what he’s good for—but they have it, his team. They have it, and him, for as long as they want him.

And Eliot looks at Parker, smirking and clever, having herself an adventure in the middle of a suicide mission, and doesn’t even need to answer. 

**

Nate isn’t having a better day than they are, and Eliot’s heartbeat is wet and dull in his ears, and he’s already doing the math on how quickly he can get to them. Already planning for the worst.

“Nate, we have to do something,” Sophie says.

“Nate,” says Eliot.

‘No, no, no—if Moreau finds out we’re in the country, he’s gonna kill—Soph—”

“Nate,” says Eliot. “Orders.” _Please, God, not like this, not when I’m not with them—_

“Just—she’s—it’s fine, she’s just, you know, putting her face on national television because that’s what keeping a low profile means, apparently—”

Eliot lets out the breath he’s holding. Lets go of Parker’s arm. “You want me there?”

There’s a long pause. 

“No. You two stay downstairs, I’ll let you know if we need you.”

**

The deal goes south. 

It doesn’t matter, because Damien has Eliot, and Eliot’s good at a lot of things, but he’ll never be as good at anything as he is at killing. He knows this, by now; knows his body is mostly teeth and knuckles, more scar than skin, a catalogue of the things it’s done and the things done to it. Eliot knows what he’s made for. 

His hands do harm. 

He soaks the ground in red like a libation. 

“You wrecked my shoes,” says Damien mildly, lifting one bloodstained oxford for Eliot to see.

“Yeah?” Eliot dabs at his broken nose with his sleeve. Shrugs. “Wear shittier shoes next time, darlin’.” 

And Damien laughs Eliot’s favourite laugh; the warm, incredulous one, like Eliot’s the best surprise he’s ever gotten.

**

It’s evening. Nate is pacing and the sky is red and Sophie’s blown their cover. The hotel room feels smaller than it did before.

“I mean, obviously it’s not ideal,” Nate is saying, fussing with his cufflinks, eyes far away, “but we did know he’d find out, at some point.”

“Obviously,” Eliot says.

“I mean, not on day _one_ , obviously—”

“Obviously,” Eliot says.

He watches Nate’s movement—back and forth, back and forth, pendulum in a grandfather clock—through a layer of fog. He’s not quite inside of himself. Nate’s pacing, and Nate’s talking, and Eliot is sitting on the edge of the bed and gripping his own wrist hard enough to bruise and thinking _why didn’t you call for me_. 

Moreau’s voice had come over the comms, and Eliot had thought of drowning, had thought of looking up at the surface of a cold, deep lake, and Damien Moreau had stood there right next to Nate—next to fucking _Hardison_ —and talked and talked and talked. _That’s not a sin, that’s vision._ And Eliot had listened, muscles locked in place, waiting. Waiting for Nate to call him to do what he does. Waiting for the screaming to start. Waiting. 

_You want me there?_

_No._

Eliot’s spent six months worrying about when he’ll need to put his body between them and danger, but never whether or not they’ll _let_ him. 

Nate paces. Eliot’s mouth tastes like chlorine.

“Nate,” says Eliot, voice wavering a little, and he’s not sure what he’s about to give up before he’s signing it away, “anythin’ you need handled, you tell me.”

Nate blinks. “Sorry?”

“I’m—” His nails dig into his wrist. He’s not used to people needing _clarification_. “I don’t want you thinkin’ I’m gonna hold back just ‘cause I know the guy. Or that you can’t—that I won’t—you just, you need somethin’ done, you tell me.” He swallows. “Please.”

Nate looks a little like Eliot’s just carved his chest open at the dinner table and handed him something bloody. And then his face smooths back over, considering, filing Eliot’s offering away for later. 

“Okay,” he says, careful and slow. “Good to know.”

**

“Hey,” says Parker, bouncing along next to him as he walks. The sun is blinding. Moreau knows they’re here and Flores is still underground and Eliot’s wound so tight he can barely turn his head to look at her. 

“What?”

Nate’s sent them to scope out some Senator’s office, which they’ve done, and grab some files from the Parliament basement, which they’ve done, and Eliot knows he’s being kept busy, and—

“Can we get gelato?”

He blinks. It’s a simple thing to ask him for. It’s a simple thing to want. She’s Parker and she’s bored and she wants something sweet. 

“Yeah, okay,” Eliot finds himself saying, brow furrowed. “I know a place.”

**

The first time Eliot looks Moreau in the eye and lies isn’t by the pool, making a statue of his body and counting how long Hardison has left to hold his breath.

It’s in August, in Malta. 

He can’t call it a vacation, because his employer doesn't like drawing lines between business and pleasure, but it _is_ something slow, and easy, Damien’s body a warm line pressed against his as they look out over the balcony. The sky drifts lazily between pink and blue.

Eliot knows he’s just another possession to the man, even if he’s his favourite; knows Damien takes his closeness like he takes anything else he wants—an indulgence, like wine, like the caviar he keeps trying to convince Eliot to enjoy. But Eliot doesn’t get a lot of physical contact outside of violence, these days, and Damien keeps standing _so fucking close_ to him, warmth bleeding right through fabric; keeps brushing his fingers against Eliot’s as he refills his drink, and Eliot’s stomach is full of heat and expensive wine. It takes him apart, that closeness. Makes him too aware of his skin, feeling the open hum of Damien’s voice echoing through him as he talks—about Croatia, this time, car bombs and grief and blinding opportunity—and melts him from the inside out. He forgets himself. 

So when Damien leans into him and asks, soft and low, “Eliot, do you ever see your sister?” Eliot almost tells the truth.

“Sure,” he almost lets himself say. “Twice a year, maybe, if I’m lucky, and it breaks my goddamn heart. Dunno what her kid looks like anymore.” He doesn’t. He catches himself. He bites his tongue hard enough to taste copper.

It’s a close thing. 

He always wants to give Damien what he wants, is the problem; always hands over whatever parts of himself the man asks for, no matter the scar it leaves. Eliot’s good at that. At giving. At knowing which pieces of him are valuable to which people, and letting them have it, and not crying about it later. 

But even though Damien is warm and kind next to him right now, dark eyes looking at him like he’s worth something, Eliot knows what Damien Moreau is. Eliot knows the shape of him no matter what face he’s wearing—no matter how gently he rests his hand over Eliot’s wrist, now, thumb brushing at his pulse, maddeningly warm—and Eliot knows what he’s capable of. A razor blade hidden under velvet and a smile. 

“Nah,” says Eliot, taking his wrist back, but leaning his weight into Damien’s shoulder to offset it. “Not in years. Don’t really get along.”

**

“Where would you be?” Parker asks. She’s carving through her gelato with surgical precision, trying to get some of each topping onto her spoon. 

Last time he’d come here, they’d have you choose between cream, hazelnut, and pistachio, and you’d choose, and you’d eat it like it was meant to be eaten. Now, they’ve given Parker access to chocolate sauce, chocolate chips, slices of strawberry, dark chocolate shavings—it’s more topping than gelato, at this point. Something for the tourists, probably.

Eliot’s picked pistachio, ‘cause Eliot’s not a heathen.

“Where would I—what?”

She looks at him in that sideways, evaluating way she’s been doing since DC. Like she’s trying to figure out how to swipe him before security sees.

“If you weren’t here. Where would you be?”

“If I weren’t here as in _here with you_ , or here as in San Lorenzo, or—” 

“No, _here_ .” She frowns. “If you weren’t _here_.”

He knows Parker’s brain isn’t like his. Eliot’s brain is a series of well-organized compartments. Labels. Things locked in cages. Parker’s is more like...is maybe a multicoloured web of thread, or a winding road, or a string of flashing Christmas lights all tangled up in a box in the attic. You’ve got to meet her where she’s at, or no one gets anywhere. He takes a step back, mentally. Zooms out.

“If I weren’t with the team, you mean?” 

She smiles and nods, ponytail bobbing, golden in the sun. “Yeah. Here.” 

He nods, too. Echoes her. “I dunno, Parker. That’s...kind of a tough one.” _Dead_ , he doesn’t say. _Long, long dead, with nothing good to show for it_. “Doin’ retrievals, I guess. More of the same. Why?” 

She shrugs. It’s a halting, practiced kind of movement. She focuses intently on stacking chocolate chips onto her already overloaded spoon. “So if you were going to go somewhere _different_ ,” she says, instead of answering his question, “and be a different Eliot, do you think...Europe? Africa? Sophie would pick Europe to start with, I think, and then we can narrow it down to—”

“Parker—”

“I just want to know where to look. That’s all.”

He frowns at her. She frowns back at him, mirror reflection, and shovels the heaping spoonful into her mouth. 

He sighs. “I’m not goin’ anywhere, Parker, Jesus.”

“You look like you are,” she says around a mouthful of sugar. He grimaces.

“Oh, I _look_ like I’m—”

“Going. After. So I need to know where. So I can—” she balances a few more chocolate chips onto her spoon “—steal you back, if I have to. You’re probably good at hiding.”

Something stirs in his chest, warm and half-awake. “Look, if you—” It comes out a little hoarse. He clears his throat. “If y’all still want me around, Parker, I’m here. I’m not goin’ anywhere.” 

“Why wouldn’t we want you?” She asks it like she can’t imagine the answer, head cocked to the side. He can see her thinking. Spinning the combination dial and listening to the mechanisms shift around. 

He scrapes the last of his gelato out of his cup and gets to his feet; running, running, running. It’s what he’s good at. She’s not wrong.

And it’d be...it’d be so much simpler to run, he knows, from all of this. To quit being battered between _fight-flight-freeze_ and fucking pick the one he's tried before and lived through; to leave Moreau to do what Moreau does, here on his island, and pretend again like if he doesn’t look at the evil it isn’t really happening, and run, and run, and run. 

Only—

_These people you are with now, would you leave any of them behind? Ever?_

No, is the thing. Is the easiest answer. Unshakeable fact. The sky is blue and the earth is round and Eliot’ll never leave them, not for any reason, not ‘til he’s dead and buried and burning somewhere. Not so long as they’ll have him.

He swallows. Parker has chocolate at the corner of her mouth.

“Finish that while we walk, we’ve gotta—we should—come on.”

**

They all camp out together in Nate and Sophie’s suite, the first night, and Eliot readies himself to watch doors and windows and listen for footsteps outside ‘til the sun comes up. 

Strength in numbers. 

Eggs in one basket. 

Eliot wants so badly to keep them all in one place—easy to reach, easy to watch over—that he doesn’t even argue. 

They arrange themselves into a weird little sleep circle, same as they’d done back at Nate’s: Sophie sprawled out on the couch, looking like an oil painting with her hair splayed out across the pillow—like everything she does is thought out and measured, even while she’s asleep; Nate, crumpled up onto the mattress he’s dragged out onto the floor, shoes on, restless; Hardison in the armchair, computer open on his lap, determined to stay awake right up until the sky starts turning from black to indigo, and Eliot glances over and catches him with his head dropped down to his chest, snoring softly. 

It settles him, having them all in one place. Takes the fear out from under his ribs—tingling in his fingers, tightening his jaw, making his heartbeat stutter anytime he catches movement from the corner of his eye—and wraps it up in something soft. Muffles it. Makes it easier to carry, just for a little while.

And Parker...well.

Eliot does the rounds, checking locks on windows and sweeping for bugs one last time with the doohickey Hardison’s put together. He counts steps between each point of egress. Hides a few knives where they’ll be easy to grab. Braces for a losing battle. Parker tracks him with her eyes the whole time, perched on the arm of the last empty chair, tying and untying knots into the coil of rope in her lap. 

He comes to a stop behind the couch. Her fingers tie and untie, over and over, over and over.

Fisherman’s knot. Alpine bowline. Noose.

“You gonna sleep?” he murmurs into the quiet. 

She shrugs. He waits for her to speak; tries to give her time, like Hardison does. He doesn’t have Hardison’s patience. He’s not sure anyone has Hardison’s patience. 

“Alright.” He settles onto the floor at the feet of her chair. It’s a good spot. He’d shifted all the furniture around when no one was looking; he can see them all from here, chests rising and falling. The window. The door. He’s stashed a knife between the cushions. It’s a good spot. 

It won’t be enough, if he’s honest. None of it. Any of it. His team is kind, and good, and Eliot’s buried people with their kindness and their goodness right in the dirt beside them, and a lock on the door didn’t stop him then. It won’t stop Moreau now. 

Still, he’ll be damned twice over if he doesn’t _try_. 

“Why are you down there?” 

He blinks up at Parker. She’s stopped tying. She looks like a ghost with the lights off, all pale and still and wide-eyed.

“You wanted the chair, right?” 

“I took the arm.”

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“So why are you down there?”

“‘Cause...you took...the—” Parker extends one graceful leg and pokes him firmly with her foot. 

“That’s dumb. Sit on the chair.”

And Eliot is tired, and his body already hurts, and he’s pretty sure if Parker actually wanted to sleep she’d rig herself up to hang like a bat from the ceiling somewhere, so he grumbles and moves. 

They don’t talk. Her hands start up again—quick, sure little movements, almost faster than his eye can track. Her elbow brushes at the side of his head.

Farmer’s loop. Stopper knot. Noose. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, we finally made it to San Lorenzo! Time for some Moreau Hunting. As always, I treasure all comments and kudos, and hope you're all staying safe! Have a lovely week <3


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